













































































Class__ 

Book - , M 4- 
CoipghiN?___ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 


* 






































THE PERSON OF CHRIST 



























THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

BEING A 

CONSIDERATION OF THE HOMILETIC 
VALUE OF THE BIBLICAL VIEW 
OF THE NATURE OF 
THAT PERSON 


BY 

EDWARD H. MERRELL, D.D., LL.D. 

n 

Lately President, and Professor of Philosophy 
in Ripon College 



OBERLIN. OHIO 

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA COMPANY 
1910 


,\\v 


Copyright 1910 

BY BIBLIOTHECA SACRA CO. 
Printed May, 1910 



Press of News Printing Co. 
Oberlin, O. 


©GI.A265384 


INTRODUCTION 

This little book was nearly all in type at the 
time of the death of its gifted author on February 
23, 1910. Though he read only a small portion of 
the proof, his manuscript had been so carefully 
prepared that there was little need of his further 
oversight. 

The volume is the product of thorough training 
in classical, scientific, and theological studies, of 
long experience in contact with men through both 
the pulpit and the professor’s chair, and of careful 
attention to the mainsprings of Christian life and 
activity. 

Both the large number of pupils whose lives 
have been, in part, molded by his instruction dur¬ 
ing the last fifty years, and the members of the 
neighboring churches to which he ministered dur¬ 
ing the most of this period, will find here, in com¬ 
pact and fine literary form, the conceptions of truth 
which roused his own religious affections and 
which stimulated and directed the fruitful activi¬ 
ties of his long educational career. 

It is fortunate for all classes of readers that he 
has left so finished and complete a record of the 
faith from which such a life has sprung. Educated 
in both the College and the Seminary at Oberlin 
during the days of Finney and Morgan and Fair- 
child, President Merrell has preserved the spirit of 


those great leaders in theological thought, and 
with marked success has adjusted the form of their 
teaching to the wants of the present generation. 
The book needs but to be known to be fully appre¬ 
ciated and to exert a marked influence for good in 
these times of unrest. 

Oberlin, Ohio 

May 20, 1910 


G. Frederick Wright 


TO 

MY BELOVED WIFE 

MY STAY AND COMFORT THROUGH THE YEARS, 
WHO SO FULLY SYMPATHIZED WITH ME IN ALL 
THINGS OF REAL SIGNIFICANCE, AND WHO SO 
THOROUGHLY AGREED WITH ME IN CHRIST, 
AND HENCE IN ALL GREAT THINGS, FOR ALL 
GREAT THINGS ARE IN HIM. 





PREFACE 

In human society there is a strong, and largely 
beneficial, tendency of opinions and convictions to 
gravitate to a common center. “ Nature,” says 
Sir William Hamilton, “ has wisely implanted in 
us a tendency to assimilate in opinions and habits 
of thought to those with whom we live and act.” 
And Sir William adds, “ This is not to be re¬ 
gretted ; it is natural, and consequently right.” 
Clearly so, for without it social anarchy would 
take the place of the customary social order. 

Nevertheless, what is right for the social order 
may be very wrong in ethical tendency; for the 
common mind is easily led astray. Mankind on 
the average is not severely intellectual nor logical; 
and a current fashion or fad, of which an un¬ 
scrupulous or fanatical or ill-informed or unbal¬ 
anced leader may take advantage, will often 
subvert systems that have been founded on sound 
principles, established in the public confidence by 
healthful traditions, and wrought into wholesome 
forms of life and character. 

And in religion the dangers from prevailing un¬ 
sound customs, beliefs, and sentiments are greater 


X 


Preface 


than in any other sphere. This is naturally so for 
the double reason that man is made for religion 
by creation; and, secondly, because the interests of 
religion are supreme. Where the interests are su¬ 
preme, the losses from error or neglect, on the one 
hand, and the gains from obedience and trust, on 
the other, are measured by standards that approach 
the infinities. We are supposed at the present 
time to be living in a period of theological recon¬ 
structions. Old conceptions are abandoned by 
great numbers; emphasis has been newly dis¬ 
tributed and replaced; and assumed discoveries 
are brought forward and defended, constituting in 
the minds of many a body of new doctrine ready 
to be taught from Christian pulpits. 

It would be a great mistake to assume that it is 
not important to subject these new views to earnest 
scrutiny, and to expose their limitations, if they 
are unsound and if the proclamation of them is at¬ 
tended with danger to the masses of the people 
that constitute the social order. The assumption 
that the truth will take care of itself has no war¬ 
rant either in the history of thought or in the na¬ 
ture of the case. What has been gained and 
securely held has been fought for; and the contest 
is even now on. Error in a world of sin easily 


Preface 


xi 


survives; truth is conserved only by the struggles 
of honest minds and the favoring aid of the reveal¬ 
ing Spirit of God. Dr. Peter T. Forsyth has re¬ 
cently affirmed that “ the gospel is now fighting 
for its life within the church as truly as within the 
world, and far more subtly.” And the impression, 
too prevalent, I fear, that the life and doctrine of 
the church have been kept pure by the criticisms 
of “ good heretics ” is not warranted by any just 
interpretation of the facts of human history. A 
writer in the Christian Commonwealth (London) 
has recently said: “ If I know anything whatever 

of human history you may take it from me that 
that idea of the progressive correction of the 
Christian church is totally false. I do not say that 
now and again a heretic may not have said some¬ 
thing that was very valuable to the Christian 
church, but I say that it is false that upon the whole 
the Christian church was wrong and the heretics 
right as the ages went on. About half of the ef¬ 
forts of the Christian church since it has existed 
in the world have been directed to restraining re¬ 
ligious fanaticism.” 

Of all theological subjects, none are of more 
intrinsic importance than those concerning the per¬ 
son of Christ; for true views of his person are 


Preface 


xii 

essential to right thinking and correct living in the 
total of the religious province. Mistake in many 
spheres of knowledge may be misfortune: in this, 
mistake is likely to be fatal. And the danger be¬ 
comes formidable and obstinate when the form of 
error prevails as a tolerated fashion. The prophet 
may be right and the world wrong; but the mass 
will sweep on, and he will be like the comb on the 
crest of a wave. In the prevalence of unsound 
sentiments judgment becomes bewildered, and the 
social mind becomes fixed in a stolid set, whose 
firmness resists the stress of reason, the persua¬ 
sions of eloquence, and even the influence of the 
striving Spirit of God. This is the apology, if one 
is needed, for directing attention again to the Per¬ 
son of Christ, and to some of the truths involved 
in the assumption that that person is divine. 

Edward H. Merrell 

Ripon, Wisconsin 

November 8, 1909 


CONTENTS 


Chapter Page 

I. Importance of the Subject. 1 

II. The Person of Christ and the Tri¬ 
unitv of God. 16 

III. The Person of Christ and the Holy 

Spirit . 37 

IV. The Person of Christ and the Book 55 

V. The Person of Christ and Redemp¬ 
tion . 72 

VI. The Person of Christ and Regen¬ 
eration . 93 

VII. The Person of Christ and Evangel¬ 
ization . Ill 

VIII. The Person of Christ and the 

Kingdom . 128 

IX. The Person of Christ and Retri¬ 
bution . 147 

X. The Person of Christ and the End¬ 
less Future . 165 






















CHAPTER I 


THE TRUE THEORY OF CHRIST’S 
PERSON IMPORTANT 

That Christ himself esteemed it important that 
his followers should have a true view of the nature 
of his person we learn from his own words; for he 
taught them that a knowledge of his person is not 
only possible but essential. Indeed, the entire ques¬ 
tion concerning Christianity — its value to the world, 
its scope, and its power — hinges on the nature of 
Christ as a person, rather than on what he taught. 
The authority of Christ is sometimes thought to 
reside in the elevation and purity of his teachings, 
their appeal to our reason, and their adaptedness to 
win general assent; and it is often affirmed with 
confidence that the words are equally true and 
weighty whether uttered by a mere man or are in¬ 
deed the very word of God. It is true that many 
of the precepts of Christ come to the mind like the 
axioms, simply and self-evidently; but this is be¬ 
cause the human mind is made for the truth, and to 
honest minds it should ever make successful appeal. 

But it is one thing to win the assent of the intel¬ 
lect, and quite another to gain the allegiance of the 


2 


The Person of Christ 


heart; and for this latter the word must ever be a 
word for faith, a surrender in simple trust to a per¬ 
son having the authority in himself to utter com¬ 
mands and to proclaim sanctions. The world has 
ever had light; its need is motive for obedience to 
the light it has, and this it will never supply from 
itself. Christ took vast care before he left the world 
that no mistake should be made as to what he was. 
All of the Synoptists record the conversation at 
Caesarea Philippi when Christ pointedly asked the 
disciples, “ Who do men say that the Son of man 
is ? ” They replied, “ Some say John the Baptist; 
some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the 
prophets.” It was in no spirit of mere dialectic, 
but to lead their minds to a most essential matter, 
that he asked the further question, “ But who say 
ye that I am?” Simon Peter replied for them all, 
“ Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 
This reply Christ accepted as true; and from Caesa¬ 
rea Philippi to the present day this truth has been 
the center of the resolution of theological per¬ 
plexities, the inspiration of individual and social 
religious activities, the conquering principle in the 
colossal works of the centuries of Christian civil¬ 
ization, and the ground of sound hopes for the 
blessedness of an endless future. The essential- 


True Theory of Christ's Person Important 3 


ness of Peter’s confession is emphasized in the 
surprising indorsement of it by Christ in further 
statement as recorded by Matthew; for he said that 
it was a truth given to Peter by God himself (“ flesh 
and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my 
Father who is in heaven”), and he also said that 
on it he would build his church. The teaching of 
the passage has emphasis also from the fact that we 
have in it the first recorded instance of the word 
translated “ church ” to include the whole body of 
Christian believers, that personal part of the king¬ 
dom of heaven which should embrace the whole 
world, when ‘ the kingdom of the world is become 
the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ ’ (Rev. 
xi. 15). 

The foundation of this kingdom as described in 
our passage is called “ rock,” and there is the def¬ 
inite implication that all other foundations are as 
shifting sand; and so history has proved the case 
to be. There are varying opinions as to what defi¬ 
nitely the “ rock” in the passage is intended to sig¬ 
nify ; but all the views agree in one crucial thing — 
that there is no rock without the assumption of the 
divine, only-begotten Son of God as its constitutive 
element. It is maintained by some that by the fig¬ 
ure “ this rock ” Christ intended to designate him- 


4 


The Person of Christ 


self; others that Peter’s confession of Jesus Christ 
as the Son of God is the rock; and others still that 
Peter himself is the rock. ‘ Thou art Petros [a 
piece of stone], and on this petra [a bed of stone], 
I will build my church.’ It is not my present pur¬ 
pose to discuss these varying views; for my present 
aim is the simple one, to show that in any view 
there can be no foundation for a spiritual heaven¬ 
ly kingdom, such as Christ came to establish, 
without a divine personal foundation. Suppose we 
adopt the third of the views noted above, and 
say that the rock is Peter himself. Our thought 
is then held to certain definite limitations. The 
rock cannot mean Peter as a bold man with cer¬ 
tain constitutional qualities which adapted him to 
leadership. Neither can it mean Peter merely as 
a consecrated disciple who had “ left all ” to follow 
the Master. Nor yet Peter apart from the rest of 
the disciples, for he spoke in behalf of them all. 
And surely not Peter as the head of a perpetual 
episcopate, for neither Scripture nor early history 
warrant a primacy of such a sort. And, finally, not 
on Peter in any conceivable sense without his divine 
Lord. But it is Peter with an insight which, under 
the revealing Spirit of God, discerned the Lord 
as very God, and a heart that embraced him by a 


True Theory of Christ's Person Important 5 

living faith. The rock, then, is Peter and his true 
successors — souls touched by a divine fire, re¬ 
newed by a divine regeneration, and held steadfast 
in a living faith which lays hold of him who, in a 
vital experience, is known to be the Son of God. 
Such from the beginning till now are the true foun¬ 
dation on which Christ is surely building. There 
can be no foundation without a divine Lord; neither 
without souls whose central aspirations cry out, 
“ My Lord and my God.” The City of God “ had 
twelve foundations, and on them the names of the 
twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rev. xxi. 14). We 
find in our text, then, the ground for the first great 
creed, universally accepted by the first disciples, 
embraced in two pregnant words, “ Jesus Lord.” 
This earliest creed of Christendom, two words in 
length, to be rendered Jesus is Lord, is very short 
in phrase, but long and compact in import, and 
. much more significant than many of the thin for¬ 
mulas which are vauntingly promulgated in many 
words. 

A text less often referred to than the one ex¬ 
pounded above is in Matthew xxii. 41-45. Here 
also Christ aimed to lead the thought to the mystery 
which is fundamental in his nature and essential to 
his mission. All of the Synoptists record, though 


6 


The Person of Christ 


in unequal fullness, the controversy with the Phari¬ 
sees. He asks them, “ What think ye of Christ ? 
whose son is he ? ” They give the universally ac¬ 
cepted reply, “ The son of David.” But David “ in 
the Spirit” (inspired) called him Lord; and “if 
David then calleth him Lord, how is he his son ? ” 
Now, it is utter mistake to suppose that Jesus intro¬ 
duced this matter simply to tangle the Pharisees in 
their logic; this would be a reflection on his dignity 
and a degradation of his purpose. And it is hardly 
supposable that he wished by exhibiting his superior 
dialectic to degrade the unbelieving Pharisees be¬ 
fore the multitude and so circumscribe their influ¬ 
ence. Here again, it is safe to suppose, he wished 
to direct attention to the great fundamental fact of 
his divine-human personality. To Peter and the 
disciples the astounding fact had been revealed by 
the Father in heaven; he would lead the Pharisees 
to the same revelation and the same mystery, so that 
they “ should be without excuse ” in the day of their 
impending disaster. 

The point in the logic of the passage is simple. 
In Oriental, especially Hebrew, usage the term 
“ Lord ” is such a name of honor that it was never 
applied by a father to a son or other descendant; 
yet David under the Spirit’s inspiration called this 


True Theory of Christ's Person Important 7 

particular descendant, the Messiah of all the proph¬ 
ets, Lord. Thus he was conceived to be at once 
both ancestor and son. He was both before David 
and after, and thus he affirmed again the mighty 
fact of his theanthropic personality. It is as if he 
had said: I who am the son of David, now stand¬ 
ing before you, was before David; even “ before 
Abraham was, I am.” 

In other places in the Gospel writings we find the 
same explicit teaching of Christ concerning his own 
person. Especially in the Gospel according to John 
is his unique personality declared; as, for example, 
in the conversation with Nicodemus; in the dis¬ 
course after healing the impotent man at the pool 
of Bethesda; and, especially in the sixth chapter, 
where he presents himself under the figure of the 
bread of life. But it is needless to enlarge further 
in elucidating a fact so obviously and completely 
unfolded in the words of the Master himself. 

Let us assume then that Christ’s representation 
concerning himself is true; that he is actually at 
once God and man; that he came into the world by 
the way of the incarnation in a mystery too deep 
for our expounding; that his purpose in coming 
was nothing less than the establishing and perfect¬ 
ing of a kingdom of righteousness which should be 


8 


The Person of Christ 


both blessed and eternal; that in the accomplishing 
of his work he should proclaim himself, and by joy¬ 
ful acceptance actually become, the Monarch of 
souls, — assuming all this to be true, we must 
swiftly accept the statement that the birth at Beth¬ 
lehem of Judaea is the most important of all events 
in the entire course of human history. Professor 
Philip Schaff declares that “ the Reformation of the 
sixteenth century, next to the introduction of Chris¬ 
tianity, is the greatest event in history.” And thus 
the birth in the manger at Bethlehem is a greater 
event than Luther’s mighty Reformation itself; and 
so it must be, for, apart from the birth, the Refor¬ 
mation never would have been. In the great drama 
of history great monarchies have arisen; mighty 
governments have been destroyed that others might 
be erected on their broken foundations; continents 
have been opened for new populations; and repub¬ 
lics have been built on the fundamental principles 
of human liberty and equality; but these all fade 
into insignificance beside the light that shone from 
the star that guided the wise men who brought their 
gifts to him who was born “ King of the Jews.” 

The most important event in history? Shall we 
not rather say that the incarnation, the birth of the 
God-man, is to be reckoned the most important of 


True Theory of Christ’s Person Important 9 

all events, even when we take into account the meas¬ 
ureless future? Many are stumbled by the thought 
that God should come to a little world like ours, 
and become by the way of human birth a part of a 
race so insignificant as the sin-struck creatures that 
spawn upon its surface. The universe is very vast, 
and the great future is very long; what is man, 
that God should be mindful of him? or the son of 
man, that he should visit him? The thought may 
indeed make us pause. But let us suppose that we 
are now in but the beginnings of the mighty trans¬ 
actions of a kingdom that is to be infinite in breadth 
and endless in continuance; and, further, that moral 
foundations are here being laid so deep and strong 
that what shall be built thereon can never again be 
corrupted by the lusts of sin nor shaken by the on¬ 
sets of revolt; that God is here making ready to 
fill the great universe of worlds by creations upon 
creations of beings, who shall be kept by his power 
against further ravages of sin; and, again, suppose 
that the power which is to keep is nothing other 
than our gospel, “ the power of God unto salva¬ 
tion,” — if all this is true, and who is to affirm that 
it is not? we have at once disclosed the good scien¬ 
tific principle of congruity, and the coming of God 
in Christ to our little world, his mysterious walk 


10 


The Person of Christ 


during the years of his ministry, and the sublime 
things wrought by him on Calvary, since they all 
look towards the endless future, find a rationale 
which our poor skepticisms cannot successfully 
gainsay. 

And the mighty significance of the incarnation 
renders the virgin birth of Jesus easily credible. It 
is an obvious and sorrowful fact that those who be¬ 
lieve that Christ came into the world in the natural 
way, the son of a human father, as a rule definitely 
minimize the significance of his person, his work, 
and his royal headship of an eternal kingdom. No 
merely human person could come into the world 
and successfully present himself as a Mediator be¬ 
tween God and man, earth and heaven; the Prophet 
to instruct in the truth that is absolute and final; 
the Priest to offer himself a sacrifice for the sins of 
the world, and to claim the prerogative of forgiv¬ 
ing sin; the Monarch assuming the right to rule the 
secrets of individual souls, and to give the law to 
the race in all social relations; the Sanctifier to 
cleanse from all iniquity by his many blessed offices 
and ministries; and, finally, the Judge to assign to 
each and all their several destinies, —• no mere man 
could come into the world and claim and assume all 
this without staggering under many and hopeless 


True Theory of Christ's Person Important 11 

insanities, and without inviting the contempt of all 
wise men. These stupendous claims, for these 
Christian centuries so well sustained, are proof 
enough for sound intelligence, it would seem, that 
God, and not a man, is the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ And so the Scriptures seem to make plain. 
There is a very wide difference between the concep¬ 
tion of what we may call the Jesus cult, with their 
patronizing attributions, and the lofty doxologies 
of Paul in his worshipful ascriptions of honor and 
praise and majesty to him whom he names with his 
full title, the Lord Jesus Christ. 

The history of controversy on this subject has its 
lessons for us, and in many quarters these lessons 
have not seemingly been well learned. They have 
certainly emphasized one fact; namely, that the 
question What think ye of Christ? looks to a mat¬ 
ter of simply fundamental importance. There are 
many who suppose that the doctrinal controversies 
that have arisen in the course of ecclesiastical his¬ 
tory have been unfortunate; that they have fostered 
evil, and resulted in evil only and continually. I do 
not suppose that this is a true view of the case. 
Controversies are inevitable so long as man is finite 
and questions are of great consequence. There has 
never been too great earnestness in “ contending for 


12 The Person of Christ 

the faith which was once for all delivered to the 
saints.” Indifference is a conclusive sign of the 
loss of life; a holding-aloof may be cowardice; and 
there are times when silence is treason. We must 
distinguish between a needed and proper contro¬ 
versy and the spirit in which it is conducted. Sor¬ 
rowful indeed has been much of the world’s doctrinal 
strife. Its intolerance, bitterness, and very wicked¬ 
ness have often been a reproach to churches, a mor¬ 
tal extinguishment of spirituality, and fruitful in 
issues of divisions and acrimonies. But this need 
not be so. Yet the very fact of controversial inten¬ 
sities reveals the common judgment that religious 
truth is vastly important and well worth contending 
for. The one who is astray in error naturally covets 
the privilege of teaching his vagaries without moles¬ 
tation ; but his teaching may poison the very sources 
of life. His touch may blight the heart out of which 
our very life issues. There never has been, and 
never can be, any great and successful evangel¬ 
ism that is not built on truth, and that, too, truth 
in proportion and reasonably wide comprehension. 
Strong personal character can never be built^on an 
eviscerated creed, much less on a jumble of false¬ 
hoods and speculative negations. 

It is in the light of principles like these that we 


True Theory of Christ's Person Important 13 

are to judge the great controversies — the Arian, 
the Pelagian, the Lutheran, the modern Unitarian, 
and the rest. In the opinion of some, none of these 
controversies should have occurred. Better, they say, 
Athanasius, if he had never contended for the true 
doctrine of Christ; and Augustine, if he had never 
striven against Pelagius concerning the doctrine of 
sin; and Luther, if he had never entered the lists 
against sacramentalism and salvation by works. But 
this is neither the true nor the profound view of. the 
case. Better, for example, is the conception of Har- 
nack, a historian not to be reproached with ultra¬ 
conservative prepossessions, who holds with Tho- 
masius that Athanasius “ saved the Christian 
church ”; saved it from the Arian speculation, 
which would have buried the plan of redemption 
beneath an artificial cosmology that would have con¬ 
verted Christianity into the emptiness of a merely 
philosophical scheme. We may indeed grieve that 
controversies have often been associated with a 
spirit and method hostile to the true Christian 
charity; nevertheless, out of them light has come, 
and broader foundations have been securely laid. 
The great councils, which gathered up the results 
of antecedent discussions and controversies and ex¬ 
pressed them in definite formulas, reached decisions 


14 


The Person of Christ 


which were held by Augustine to express the grow¬ 
ing insight of the church into truth, and the 
steadily advancing light of the Christian conscious¬ 
ness. The doctrinal results of the great Protestant 
Reformation were expressed in the Augsburg Con¬ 
fession; a symbol that has steadied the thought of 
one of the strongest branches of Christendom down 
to the present day. It was composed by Melanch- 
thon, yet under the watchful eye of Luther, who in 
the primary sense was its author. How Luther es¬ 
teemed it we may gather from the terms of an en¬ 
thusiastic letter to Melanchthon, written after the 
delivery of the confession, in which, with much be¬ 
sides, are these strong words: “ Be glad, then, in 
the Lord, and exult, ye righteous .... I will canon¬ 
ize you as faithful members of Christ; and what 
greater glory can you desire ? ” 

It is unthinkable that the judgment of all of these 
centuries has been wrong as to the main contention; 
which is, that the truths in which the Christian 
scheme centers are of importance as great as the 
value of souls and their destiny in ages without end. 
Mistake about the person of Christ, the cross, and 
man’s imperative need of rescue, is too grave to 
have expression in words; and it has been about 
these things centrally that the great controversies 


True Theory of Christ’s Person Important 15 

have been concerned. It is unto such things that the 
Scripture looks when it exhorts us “ to contend 
earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the 
saints.” The jaunty way in which these great mat¬ 
ters are treated by flippant worldiness and poorly 
veiled skepticism is one of the sorrowful signs of 
religious declension. When by an undiscriminating 
dialectic the fundamental doctrinal concepts are 
emptied of their content and significance; when the 
thin notion finds acceptance in the common con¬ 
sciousness that belief is unimportant, but only the 
so-called life is of account — as if we could have 
any real life that does not draw its vitality from the 
soil of truth; when under veiled uncertainties the 
heart denies the Lord that has bought us all,— then 
we may look for fruitless pastorates, stolid indiffer¬ 
ence to the awful facts of sin, Christians at ease in 
Zion, and the multitudes unconcerned as to their 
present state or future doom. 


CHAPTER II 


THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND THE 
TRIUNITY OF GOD 

- “ I happen to know,” says Dr. Archibald Alex¬ 
ander Hodge, “ that the great objection which the 
most able and influential Unitarians entertain to 
the Trinitarian system is not originated by their 
difficulty with the Trinity, considered by itself, but 
because they regard the doctrine of the Trinity to 
be inseparable from that of the Person of Christ as 
held by the church, which to them appears impossi¬ 
ble to believe.” 1 If skeptics should tarry in a care¬ 
ful scrutiny of their deepest thought, it may well 
be believed that they would discover that their 
doubts in regard to many of the Bible teachings 
are the sure outgrowths of a recoil from the repre¬ 
sentations of Scripture concerning the person of 
Christ. A mind unsettled as to what Jesus is, not 
so much in respect to what he taught, will be 
shaken in confidence concerning the Trinity, super¬ 
natural revelation, an inspired Word, regeneration, 
atonement, and retribution. Wherever you find in 
the ministry a prevalent acceptance of the humani- 
1 Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, p. 218. 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 17 

tarian view concerning the person of Christ, there 
you find all of these cardinal doctrines either ig¬ 
nored in preaching, or opposed and explained away; 
but those absolutely sane and sound in the true doc¬ 
trine of Christ’s person are not likely to be widely 
astray as to the things held to be fundamental in 
the thinking of the Christian centuries. The creeds 
of Christendom are the products of the best thinking 
during all of these centuries of Christian conquest; 
and not one of them worthy of perpetuation has 
failed, in one form or another, to say that Christ is 
God. The Middle Ages had their controversies, 
some of them violent and intolerant, but they were 
ages barren of great thinking, and so they pro¬ 
duced no creeds, “ the milestones and finger-boards 
in the history ” both of doctrine and life. 

There have always been many who are forward 
to praise the ethics of Christianity while denying 
the claims made for the Author of the Christian 
scheme; denying that he is Deity, that he is divine 
in any true and unique sense. To reflective thought 
this would seem a very surprising fact; for how 
could he be ethically true while claiming for him¬ 
self divine power, prerogative, and honor, if he 
was man and nothing more? The majesty of 
Christ’s person is so vast and imposing that it re- 


18 


The Person of Christ 


quires much of hardihood to withhold from him 
some form of special honor; so that even infidelity 
and sin pause and uncover under the spell of the 
mysterious Presence. A form of outward worship 
is offered, while a confession of that which makes 
him worthy of the Soul’s utmost allegiance is with¬ 
held ; and thus he is at once both accepted and de¬ 
nied. This state of mind is much like that in regard 
to the virtue of love , which is popularly held to be 
the summing of all the special virtues in one; and 
so it is. But many proclaim the excellence of this 
fundamental and comprehensive virtue who deny 
it the natural right of a true definition. They es¬ 
teem it to be some form of sentiment, rather than 
the soul’s fundamental allegiance to God and man 
in a self-surrendering preference and service. If, 
then, we shall have reached a true doctrine of the 
nature of the Person of Christ, we shall have set¬ 
tled much besides; and, in particular, the doctrine 
of the Trinity as accepted by the orthodox churches 
since the Council of Nicaea, or, rather, since that of 
Chalcedon, whose formula recognized, in the unity 
of one person, perfect divinity and perfect human¬ 
ity — the mighty and insoluble “ mystery of godli¬ 
ness.” 

As was natural, the first Christian controversies 


Person of Christ and, Triunity of God 19 

grew out of the contact of Christianity with Juda¬ 
ism and heathenism, which embraced doctrines 
radically antagonistic to the Christian truths. The 
new doctrine, in making its way in the world, was 
put constantly on the defensive; for it must assume 
the burden of proving when it offers itself as a sub¬ 
stitute for prevailing systems. But these very con¬ 
troversies with heathenism came to reveal varying 
conceptions of doctrine within the church itself; 
and as a consequence the field of debate changed, 
limiting itself more and more to serious attempts 
to resolve the perplexities and uncertainties appear¬ 
ing inevitably in the progress of Christian thinking. 
The shock given by the “ rough and coarse doctrine 
of Arius ” was the occasion of introducing what 
Professor Fisher calls the “ great productive period 
of doctrinal history,” in which eminent theological 
leaders crossed swords in debate, defended the posi¬ 
tive forms of truth, and prepared the way for the 
systematic formulas of the ecumenical councils. It 
is beside my present purpose to enter into the de¬ 
tails of the history of these debates. I simply 
direct attention to the fact that they centered about 
the person of Christ, that they gradually reached 
substantial harmony of view on the subject, and 
that since the early councils the church as a whole 


20 


The Person of Christ 


has agreed upon the statement that Christ is con- 
substantial with the Father; yet not, of course, 
without debate and many attempts to reach clearer 
conceptions of the unfathomable mystery and its 
necessary implications. 

In general dichotomic division we may exhibit 
the views concerning the divinity of Christ which 
have been espoused in the course of historical think¬ 
ing, and may show that no others in the nature of 
the case are logically possible. By the principle of 
logical exclusion it cannot be denied that the divine 
in Christ was either truly God or not God; he either 
was or was not. Thus we divide all at the outset 
into two classes; but in these classes there have 
been diversities of conception. Those who have 
maintained that the divine in Christ is truly God are 
to be divided again into two: for some have said 
that the divine in Christ is identical with the Father, 
as Sabellius, Swedenborg, and Dr. Horace Bush- 
nell, certainly in his earlier thinking; and others 
that he is not the Father, but the eternal Word. 
And here again is a third division: for some, like Or- 
igen and Tertullian, have maintained that Christ, or 
the divine in Christ, is subordinate to the Father, 
though truly God; while the prevalent thought in 
all of the great branches of the church from Nicaea 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 21 

to the present moment has accepted the statement 
that Christ in his deity is coeternal and consubstan- 
tial with the Father, and in all attributes equal. 
And again those who have held that the divine in 
Christ is not God are to be separated into two 
classes: for the Arians believed that the “ Word,” 
the Logos of Christ, is more than man, and is a be¬ 
ing specially created by God for the work of making 
the world and for redemption; and others, as Paul 
of Samosata and modern Unitarians in general, re¬ 
gard Christ as a mere man, in kind differing from 
no one of the human genus. A careful scrutiny of 
these various views would seem to force us to the 
conclusion that there is no sure logical halting place 
between the extremes of pure Unitarianism and the 
doctrine of Chalcedon; we must accept the revealed 
fact that Christ is God, but in unfathomable mys¬ 
tery also God and man, or come by fair logic to 
pure humanitarianism. 

The history of thinking leads us to the same con¬ 
clusion. New England Unitarianism began with 
Channing as its greatest leader, and Channing was 
an Arian; but the thought started by him found no 
safe halting place till it came to Theodore Parker 
and his pure humanitarianism. Recoil from the 
Nicene formula leads to the one inevitable issue. 


22 


The Person of Christ 


Of departures from the canon of apostolic doctrine 
on this subject there have been many, but none of 
them have survived the scrutiny of sound thinking. 
For example, the Ebionites held that Christ was the 
son of Joseph and Mary by natural generation, but 
that at his baptism he received the Spirit of God, 
by which he became conscious of his call to the 
Messiahship. The Eutychians held that Christ was 
divine, but pressed the unity to the extreme of 
maintaining that the human was absorbed in the 
divine, and thus reached the denial that Jesus was 
also man. The Nestorians went to the other ex¬ 
treme, and maintained the dual personality of 
Christ; that he was really two persons, and not one 
person, the mysterious God-man. The Monophys- 
ites of the fifth century held that Christ is God pure 
and simple, and that his humanity consisted merely 
in the possession of a human body. 

It is safe to say that these heresies and others 
more or less like them are now believed by very 
few; and that Unitarianism in some form, on the 
one hand, and the formula of the Reformed the¬ 
ology, on the other, have the field. For example, 
if we hold with Origen that the divine in Christ is 
truly God, but subordinate, how can we believe that 
God is subordinate to God, unless we should also 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 23 


assume two Gods? The doctrine of Origen, and of 
the Semi-Arians also, seems to lead the thought 
to the dualism of God, or to tritheism. But if 
we hold with Arius that the Logos was created, 
that there was a time when he was not, we 
make the Christ a mere demiurge, which brings 
us perilously near one of the grossest concep¬ 
tions of polytheism. The early orthodox think¬ 
ers did in fact look upon Arianism as an attempted 
introduction of a species of polytheism into Chris¬ 
tian theology; and it is a suggestive fact that Arius 
got the first hints of his system from Origen, whose 
doctrine of the Logos, as expressed in at least some 
of Origen’s writings, he accepted. Of Channing’s 
conception on this subject, which was essentially 
that of Arius, Dr. George Park Fisher says: “ The 
particular conception which Channing set up in the 
room of the church doctrine of the Incarnation is 
one of the crudest notions which the history of 
speculation on this subject has ever presented.” 1 
That clear thought, like Noah’s dove, finds no se¬ 
cure resting-place on the sea of speculations lying 
between the assumption of the deity of Christ and 
pure humanitarianism is instructively indicated in 
the Christology of Albrecht Ritschl and his school. 

1 History of Christian Doctrine, p. 431. 


24 


The Person of Christ 


“ There can be no mistake,” says Professor James 
Orr, “ as to the depth and intensity of this young¬ 
est religious movement ”; and he is equally con¬ 
fident that there can be no doubt concerning 
“ Ritschl’s practically humanitarian Christology.” 
The ingenuity of some of the more conservative 
thinkers of the Ritschlian school to steer clear of 
what they are pleased to call “ tritheism ” has 
brought their conceptions perilously near to a real 
humanitarian view of the person of Christ. Prob¬ 
ably Professor Charles Marsh Mead’s estimate of 
the Ritschlian position may be accepted as correct. 
He says: 

“ This misty notion of humanity as having in it an 
element of deity (not so distinctly, however, the cor¬ 
responding notion of deity as having in it an ele¬ 
ment of humanity) appears in the doctrine of one 
of the most noted of modern theologians — Al¬ 
brecht Ritschl. In his most elaborate treatise he 
deliberately sets forth the reasons why Jesus Christ 
may properly be called God, though he unequiv¬ 
ocally rejects not only the narrative of his miracu¬ 
lous birth, but the doctrine of his preexistence; and 
then adds that it is not only allowable, but necessary, 
to hold that the ‘ title ’ of deity which is conferred 
on Christ may be conferred also on his followers! 
What can be made of this but either that the ‘ title ’ 
is merely complimentary, real deity not being meant 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 25 

to be ascribed to Christ or his followers, or else 
that there is to be a general and genuine apotheo¬ 
sis ? If the first is meant, then the best that can be 
said of those who talk so freely of the ‘ deity ’ of 
Christ is that they only ‘ palter with us in a double 
sense/ and come dangerously near to the appear¬ 
ance of dishonesty. If the second is meant, then it 
involves a return to genuine polytheism. And yet 
this kind of Christology is widely heralded as the 
restoration of pristine Christianity.” 1 
In short, if we accept the revealed fact of the in¬ 
carnation, historical thought leaves no alternative; 
we must believe that Christ is God come to us in 
the flesh for revelation, redemption, and atonement. 
From this the doctrine of the Trinity easily follows. 

And why should clear thinking stumble at the 
doctrine of the Trinity, as if it involved a logical 
absurdity? Are we disturbed by the mathematical 
absurdity that three can at the same time be one? 
But three may be one, if we allow that we are using 
the words in different senses. God is not one in 
the same sense in which he is three, and Scripture 
does not require us to believe that; but it does 
teach that he is one and also three. The teaching 
of Augustine has sometimes been ridiculed because 
he taught that one person can at the same time be 
1 Irenic Theology, p. 245. 


26 


The Person of Christ 


three persons. But we should be modest and pro¬ 
ceed with care when we are criticizing the great 
thinking of Augustine, and above all we must be 
fair enough to allow him to explain himself. He 
maintained that there is but one substance or es¬ 
sence, and yet that there is in a real sense three 
persons. But he added, “ Certainly there are three. 

. . . Yet when it is asked what three? human lan¬ 
guage labors from great poverty of speech. We 
say three persons, not that it may be so said, but 
that we may not keep silence.” 1 He affirmed that 
each person is omnipotent, but added, “ there are 
not three omnipotents.” 2 In full unfolding the po¬ 
sitions of Augustine and of Athanasius are doubt¬ 
less essentially the same. Our little plummets can¬ 
not reach the ocean depths of the being of God; 
and until we should know him unto perfection, we 
can never affirm confidently concerning the possi¬ 
bilities that reside in that infinite being. “ Who 
hath directed the Spirit of Jehovah, or being his 
counsellor hath taught him? . . . Behold, the na¬ 
tions are as a drop of a bucket, and are accounted 
as the small dust of the balance. ... It is he that 
sitteth above the circle of the earth, and the inhabi¬ 
tants thereof are as grasshoppers ” (Isa. xl. 13-22). 

1 I>e Trin. v. 9. 2 Ibid., chap. 8. 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 27 


Under the true impression of the majesty of God, 
the mind readily anticipates unfathomable mys¬ 
teries in his being and manifestations, and the re¬ 
vealed facts of incarnation and triunity become 
even antecedently probable, reasonable, and wel¬ 
come to a spontaneous faith. 

In the study of the great subjects of the incarna¬ 
tion and the tripersonality of God, a careful distinc¬ 
tion must be kept in mind between what is mysterious 
and what is contradictory; between what is above 
reason and what is against reason. In the order 
of nature we are constantly accepting facts of 
which we are unable to give a philosophical ac¬ 
count. Even the simple facts of consciousness and 
reminiscence, without which we could not even 
think on any matter, either great or small, involve 
mysteries too profound for our most enlightened 
science. The Younger Scaliger is reported to have 
said: “ My father declared that of three things in 
particular he was wholly ignorant — the intervals 
of fevers, the ebb and flow of the tides, and remi¬ 
niscence.” However it may be as to fevers and 
tides, it is safe to say that the mystery of reminis¬ 
cence is not yet solved. There is mystery in the 
aurora borealis, in the transmission of light, in the 
power of gravity in bodies to act over distances 


28 The Person of Christ 

where they are not, in electric force, in growth, and 
in instinct; but we accept the facts concerning them 
all, and we busy ourselves in turning their mani¬ 
festations to account. We never think of rejecting 
the facts because they are unexplained. 

It is possible to formulate a consistent doctrine of 
the Trinity, whether or not we may be able to ex¬ 
pound it. It is a revealed doctrine, and it comes to 
us with the authority of a divine attestation. Jo¬ 
seph Cook, in one of his Tremont Temple lectures, 
proposes what he calls a “ definition ” as follows: 

" 1. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one 
God. 

“ 2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to 
the others. 

“ 3. Neither is God without the others. 

“ 4. Each with the others is God.” 1 
As Mr. Cook fairly maintains, his definition ex¬ 
cludes modalism, tritheism, and Unitarianism; also 
it is in harmony with Scripture and historical 
thought, and it is consistent with itself. 

It is interesting to mark the movements of deep 
and profoundly religious minds towards the accept¬ 
ance of the godhood of Christ and the trinity of 

1 The Trinity a Practical Truth, Monday Lecture, 
March 26, 1877. Published in The Independent. 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 29 

God as they become mature in thought and rich in 
experience. The theological position of Dr. Horace 
Bushnell, which at the first was essentially coinci¬ 
dent with Sabellianism, has already been mentioned. 
After a more careful exploration of the history of 
doctrine, and his more mature experience, he 
seemed to discover that the Nicene formula reveals 
features welcome to one who had come into the ma- 
turer Christian life. “ On a careful study of the 
creed prepared by this council” (at Nicaea), he 
says, “ as interpreted by the writings of Athanasius 
in defense of it, I feel obliged to confess that I had 
not sufficiently conceived its import, or the title it 
has to respect as a Christian document.” 1 And 
later yet, in an article in the Nezv Englander of No¬ 
vember, 1854, “ marked by consummate ability,” 
in the words of Dr. Fisher, “ he argues that the 
infinity of God ingulfs us in Pantheism unless we 
conceive of him as a triple personality.” And he 
further explicitly says: “We must have no jeal¬ 
ousy of the Three as if they were to drift us away 
from the unity or from reason; being perfectly as¬ 
sured of this, that in using the triune formula in 
the limberest, least constrained way possible, and 
allowing the plurality to blend, in the freest manner 
1 History of Christian Doctrine, p. 440. 


30 


The Person of Christ 


possible, with all our acts of worship, — preaching, 
praying, singing, and adoring, — we are only do¬ 
ing with three persons just what we do with one; 
making no infringement of the unity with the 
Three, more than of the infinity with the One.” 
“ Here,” remarks Dr. Fisher, “ is a certain real im¬ 
manence of the Trinity.” 1 

Charles Kingsley once wrote: “ My heart de¬ 

mands the Trinity as much as my reason. I want 
to be sure that God cares for us, that God is our 
father, that God has interfered, stooped, sacrificed 
himself for us. I do not merely want to love 
Christ — a Christ, some creation or emanation of 
God’s, whose will and character, for aught I know, 
may be different from God’s. I want to love and 
honor the abysmal God himself, and none other 
will satisfy me. No puzzling texts shall rob me of 
this rest for my heart, that Christ is the exact coun¬ 
terpart of him in whom we live and move and have 
our being. I say boldly, if the doctrine of the Trin¬ 
ity be not in the Bible, it ought to be, for the zvhole 
spiritual nature of man cries out for it.” 2 

Humanitarianism, under whatsoever guise, has 
been accounted heresy, and that too of a dangerous 

1 History of Christian Doctrine, p. 441. 

2 Letters and Life of Charles Kingsley (1877), p. 198. 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 31 

sort; and well it may be, for it vitiates the very cen¬ 
ter on which the soundness of theological thought 
must turn. Dr. Dorner puts the case none too 
strongly when he says: “ It is gratifying to see 

how, in the long conflict between Christianity and 
Reason, the point, on which the controversy turns, 
has become ever more and more distinct to the con¬ 
sciousness. The energies of all parties engaged in 
this conflict are gathered more and more around 
the person of Christ, as the central point at which 
the matter must be determined.” And further with 
emphasis he declares that this is “ the point where 
alone all is ultimately to be won or lost.” 1 

A form of humanitarianism has appeared of late 
which has degenerated, if one may so speak, into a 
religious cult. This cult is a conventional form of 
religion, having a kind of patronizing reverence for 
Christ as human, exalting him as an ethical exam¬ 
ple and leader, but with a denial of his divine per¬ 
sonality and his power as Redeemer and Lord. 
Dr. Wilhelm von Schneten, himself an advanced 
Liberal, has recently publishel a work that has at¬ 
tracted much attention, entitled “ The Modern 
Jesus Cult.” The following extracts from his book 
are given as indicating whither the logic of this 
ir The Person of Christ, First Division, vol. i. pp. vi, vii. 


32 


The Person of Christ 


particular form of humanitarianism leads us. He 
significantly says: 

“ The modern Jesus cult is a romantic reverence 
for the ‘ human ’ or the ‘ historical ’ Jesus, the way 
for which was prepared by Herder, and was put 
into distinct theological formulas by Schleiermacher, 
was then fully developed by Ritschl, and in recent 
years, in hundreds of variant forms, has become 
popular through thousands of publications, by the 
lectures of ‘ critical ’ theologians and the preaching 
of * liberal ’ pulpits. In fact the Jesus problem has 
become the great religious question of the day, 
around which all other religious convictions and life 
seem to circle. 

“ It is on this recognition of Jesus as Master that 
liberal theologians base their claim that what they 
teach is ‘ Christianity \ . . . In one word, the entire 
religion of the modern man, as Naumann expressly 
declares, is a cult or worship of the ideal human 
being Jesus, ‘ the religious and ethical model.’ The 
veneration of his human personality, faith in the 
* eternal ’ significance of his words, and pious imi¬ 
tation of his love for others is represented to be 
‘ the essence of Christianity,’ and the only thing 
that constitutes true religion.” 

Dr. von Schneten raises the question whether 
the modern Jesus cult of liberal theology can be 
called Christian, and for himself answers the ques¬ 
tion in the negative. He argues: 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 33 

“ It must not be forgotten that Christianity is,... 
not faith in Jesus, but faith in Christ, and faith in 
Jesus only in so far as Jesus is regarded, as Christ 
is, as the Redeemer and the Son of God; more¬ 
over, a ‘ Son of God ’ and a ‘ Redeemer ’ in the real 
historical sense of the term, and not in a modern¬ 
ized emphasizing of these expressions into general 
and meaningless terms. In a word, Christianity is 
a Christ-religion, is faith in redemption solely and 
alone through the true Son of God, Jesus Christ. 
... It is this faith in the divine redemption that has 
been reechoed in the hymns and prayers of Chris¬ 
tianity and that has revolutionized the world.” 1 

In an “ Outlook Conference ” referred to in 
Unity of February 28, 1907, (the organ of the lib¬ 
eral movement of which the Rev. Jenkin Lloyd 
Jones is the leader,) the question “ How does Lib¬ 
eral Orthodoxy differ from Unitarianism ? ” was 
discussed, and letters were sent to prominent Uni¬ 
tarian ministers requesting answers to the question. 
Dr. Edward Everett Hale replied as follows: “ I 

thought at first that I would add an essay on * lib¬ 
eral orthodoxy.’ But I will not. I might say some¬ 
thing cross. Practically all of them are Unitar¬ 
ians and some of them dare say so.” This charge 
must be accounted a serious one, whether con- 


1 See Literary Digest of December 7, 1907. 


34 


The Person of Christ 


sidered from the doctrinal or the ethical stand¬ 
point; and one may hope that the good Doctor is 
mistaken, though he has said the same thing in sub¬ 
stance before. We may not question the purity and 
devoutness of the lives of many who have embraced 
the doctrines of Unitarianism. Yet we may not 
“ shut our eyes to the fact that Unitarianism has 
never been a strong redemptive force. It has been 
tried repeatedly. It has had great opportunities. It 
has had wise and enterprising leaders. But it has 
always failed to save the communities in which it 
has been most firmly planted. It has not even kept 
its own children. It has won from the world a se¬ 
lect few, but the great mass of the sinning and suf¬ 
fering have sought the help which they needed in 
the Trinitarian denominations.” 1 

We may safely conclude that great thinking, and 
the great life that can result only from true think¬ 
ing and sound doctrine affectionately embraced, will 
in the end find rest in the words of John: “ In the 
beginning [that is, in the past eternity] was the Word 
[that is, the Word was existing], and the Word 
was with God [that is, the Word was in a true 
sense personal, and yet not the whole of the God- 

*Dr. Franklin Johnson, The Christian’s Relation to 
Evolution, p. 72. 


Person of Christ and Triunity of God 35 

head], and the Word was God [that is, divine, the 
word translated “ God ” being without the article]. 
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us 
[that is, the Word became incarnate in humanity].” 
Here, then, let us pause. Him “ who is absolutely 
one, who is at the same time pure, unmixed, un¬ 
changed God, and pure, unmixed, unchanged man, 
and whose person in its wholeness and fullness is 
available throughout all space and throughout all 
time to those who trust him and love his appear¬ 
ing,” 1 we humbly and reverently adore. Let us 
not be stumbled by the deep mystery. Says Dr. A. 
M. Fairbairn: 

“ The supreme necessity of faith is one with the 
ultimate necessity of thought — viz., a God who 
can be related to the universe, one who is not an 
infinite abstraction or empty simplicity, but who is 
by nature a living and, as it were, productive and 
producing Being. To be this he must have imma¬ 
nent and essential modes and forms of activity, and 
because he has these he may have outer relations 
created by energies freely exercised. 

“ These inner and essential modes or forms are 
not known to us by nature, but by revelation. Rea¬ 
son may see that they must be if God is to be a 

1 Hodge, Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, p. 
233 . 


36 


The Person of Christ 


living God, but what they are can be known only if 
he spontaneously speak or reveal himself. This he 
did in Jesus Christ; and what he showed was the 
Father-Sonship. There may be other infinite modes 
and forms, but here we know only what has been 
made known.” 1 

lr The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 398- 
399. 




CHAPTER III 


THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 

Among the last words spoken by Christ to his 
followers while yet a bodily presence with them 
were those recorded in the fourteenth chapter of 
John. He said, “ If ye love me, ye will keep my 
commandments. And I will pray the Father, and 
he shall give you another Comforter, that he may 
be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth: whom 
the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth him not, 
neither knoweth him: ye know him; for he abideth 
with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you 
desolate: I come unto you ” (ver. 15-18). And fur¬ 
ther Jesus says, “ Whom the Father will send in my 
name ” (ver. 26); and again, “Whom I will send 
unto you from the Father” (xv. 26) ; and further, 
“ If I depart, I will send him unto you” (xvi. 7). 
The discussions of the Middle Ages as to whether 
the Spirit is sent by the Father alone, or by the Fa¬ 
ther and the Son, were chiefly a war of words, and 
threw little light on this deeply significant though 
clearly mysterious matter. The deep and comforting 
fact is, that Christ wished the disciples to know that 


38 


The Person of Christ 


the withdrawal of his bodily presence was not 
the withdrawal of himself; for it was even expedient 
that he go from sight that he might be the more 
fully revealed to faith. In harmony with this thought 
is the command to Mary in the garden on that won¬ 
derful Easter morning: “Touch me not; for I am 
not yet ascended unto the Father” (John xx. 17). 
The logic of the passage is fixed by the words “ not 
yet ”; that is to say, ‘ Thou mayest not now touch, 
caress, me in bodily presence; but after I shall 
have ascended to the Father, and the Spirit shall 
have revealed me a living presence and power, then 
thou mayest lay hold of my real self by faith and 
love/ The spiritual touch is the essentially vital 
matter. In the introduction to his First Epistle, 
John with wonderful skill blends the corporeal and 
the spiritual. The incarnate Christ his eyes had 
seen, his ears heard, his hands touched; but be¬ 
yond this outward and visible form the mind rests 
on the Word of Life, “ the eternal life, which was 
with the Father, and was manifested unto us.” 

“ In salvation,” says Fairbairn, “ there is a three¬ 
fold Divine causality — the Father who gives, the 
Son who is given, and the Holy Spirit who renews 
and reveals. And these are so united as to be in¬ 
separable in essence and in act. The Father is the 


The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 39 

fount, the Son the medium, the Spirit the distribu¬ 
tor of grace. The Father is known, because he is 
manifested in the Son; the work of the Son is a 
sacrifice, because he is delivered of the Father; and 
the Spirit is now the Spirit of the Son, and now the 
Spirit of God. It is the unity of the whole that 
constitutes the efficiency of each, yet the difference 
is as suggestive as the unity.” 1 

Four lessons of the highest practical value con¬ 
cerning the relations of the Son and the Spirit lie 
in the New Testament representations, and to these 
we direct attention. 

1. The first is that by the indwelling Spirit 
Christ is everywhere present. This is not a bodily 
presence; but we make a vast mistake, if on that 
account we deny that there is a real presence. Let 
us accept the statement in Christ’s conversation 
with Nicodemus just as it stands, and note the 
teaching: “And no one hath ascended into heaven, 
but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son 
of man, who is in heaven” (John iii. 13). Here 
the representation is that the same person is at 
once on earth and in heaven. Because of his di¬ 
vinity he is omnipresent, though as to his human 
nature he was fixed to place like any other man. 

1 The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 491. 


40 


The Person of Christ 


The exact fact according to the Scriptures is, that 
the omnipresent Deity is everywhere in power and 
ministry for us by the fact of his humanity. Christ 
is God, available to us by virtue of his humanity. 
The words of the great commission (Matt, xxviii. 
18-20) teach the same truth. As divine, Jesus had 
all authority in heaven and earth ; and sending his 
disciples forth to all nations, he said, “ Lo, I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world,” 
the consummation of the age. This does not mean 
that, although apart from them in heaven, he would 
as Advocate remember them with sympathy and 
prayers; rather it was the promise of his personal 
presence, ubiquitous and available, in all their min¬ 
istries, sufferings, and triumphs. In him they were 
to find their wisdom and power, as the things of 
the very Christ himself should be revealed to them 
by the enduement of the Holy Spirit. In him the 
things of the spiritual world were to be made and 
kept real. The Christ was to dwell in their hearts 
through faith, and they were to “ be filled unto all 
the fulness of God.” The reason why men seem to 
have lost “ a strong sense of the reality of spiritual 
things ” is not obscure. The spiritual world be¬ 
comes vague to their thought and unreal to their 
faith in precise proportion as they lose the beatific 


The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 41 

vision of the Lord in the clear light of the Spirit’s 
revealing. 

And the philosopher, not to say the Christian be¬ 
liever, need have no trouble with the skeptic’s puz¬ 
zle concerning the meaning of John xiv. 3: “And 
if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come 
again, and receive you unto myself.” The most 
obvious meaning of these words is, that the Christ 
will come personally at the death of the Christian; 
for he added, “ that where I am, there ye may be 
also.” Christ was not comforting the disciples by 
telling them something about an advent that should 
occur at the end of the world age, but of a coming 
that should convoy them to the Father’s house, in 
which are “ many mansions.” In the extreme hour, 
when human ministries from the nature of the case 
must end, the comforting Lord should be present 
to take his child to himself. “And they shall see 
his face,” says the Revelator, and the words are 
to be taken as literally true. We do not forget the 
skeptic’s cavil, when he says, “ Many die every 
hour, nay, every moment; and how can the Christ 
be present at every Christian’s dying bed ? ” By 
the showing of the immanent Spirit he is every¬ 
where, the true answer is; and very especially is he 
present at the point of the Christian’s extreme 


42 


The Person of Christ 


need. “ While Christ was sensibly present among 
men,” says a Boston lecturer, “ his presence must 
be local; his service for them must be special and 
temporary; so he could not serve the need of all. 
But now that his bodily presence is withdrawn, and 
all his earthly work complete, the Divine Spirit 
everywhere enters the souls of men, and Christ be¬ 
comes spiritually ubiquitous and sufficient. All that 
he ever did and bore, all the relations he ever took, 
become living spiritual realities, answering always 
and everywhere the believer’s want.” 1 Who sees 
most clearly the real Christ? Surely not Iscariot, 
though he heard his instruction and saw the mani¬ 
festations of his power. Neither the theoretical 
advocate of some “ Jesus Cult,” who aspires to ex¬ 
pound the “ mystery of godliness ” by his human 
ingenuity and dialectic skill. The simple heart sees 
farther than the worldling’s head; and wherever in 
all the world, in palace, mansion, or hut, there is 
found the spirit of simple trust, there the true 
Christ is revealed to knowledge and to need. Says 
Dr. Hodge: 

“ The human attributes of our divine Redeemer 
are the organ of his divine Person, and through 

1 Rev. W. E. Merriman, D.D., in Boston Lectures on 
Christianity and Scepticism (1877), pp. 288-289. 


The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 43 

the divinity rendered virtually inexhaustible and 
ubiquitously available for us. When you put your 
babe to bed and leave him to go your own way to 
a distant place, you say, ‘ Love, fear not; Jesus will 
be with you while I am gone.’ You know that Jesus 
will be with you also at the same time, and with all 
believers. By this you do not mean simply that 
Christ’s divinity will be with you and the babe. 
You mean that the Person who is very man as well 
as very God will be with you both. You want his 
human love and sympathy as well as his divine be¬ 
nevolence. If he were a mere man he could be 
only at one place at one time, and his attention and 
sympathy would soon be overwhelmed by our de¬ 
mands. But he is at once God and man, and as 
such, in the wholeness and fulness of both natures, 
he is inexhaustible and accessible by all believers 
in heaven and on earth at once and forever.” 1 

2. But, second, not only is Christ everywhere; 
he is everywhere transcendent. Dr. Mark Hop¬ 
kins introduced his great address before the Amer¬ 
ican Board at its meeting at Des Moines in 1886 
with a striking sentence, characterized by his dis¬ 
criminating thinking and his remarkable power of 
lucid statement. He said, “ Nature reveals God in 
his immanence; Christ reveals God in his transcend¬ 
ence.” This compound antithetic formula holds 

1 Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, pp. 231-232. 


44 


The Person of Christ 


more of truth than some volumes on the doctrine 
of immanence can fairly claim. Christ is omni¬ 
present in the sense explained in the foregoing 
y point, but to all true worship he is transcendent; 
and wherever the soul meets him in the spirit of 
trust, he is objective to faith, a Person who knows 
our frame, feels for our infirmities, and screens us 
from the perils of our transgressions. A dangerous 
error is that which reduces worship to mere sub¬ 
jective broodings. The worship of the Psalmist 
(cxxiii. 1-2) is also the worship of Christ. 

“ Unto thee do I lift up mine eyes, 

O thou that sittest in the heavens. 

Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the 
hand of their master, 

As the eyes of a maid unto the hand of her 
mistress; 

So our eyes look unto Jehovah our God, 

Until he have mercy upon us/’ 

Some of the recent expositions of the doctrine of 
the divine immanence, since they encourage an un¬ 
sound subjectivism, a semi-pantheistic identification 
of God with the world, have an unwholesome influ¬ 
ence on the spirit of true worship. There is a wide 
difference between pietistic egoism and the robust 
self-surrender of manly reverence. God is im¬ 
manent ; but if he is nothing more, he is nothing 




The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 45 

of importance to reverent worship. The God- 
intoxication, so-called, of pantheism uniformly 
degenerates into some weak form of subjective 
sentiment; and eventually the soul of true worship 
disappears from human experience. There is 
doubtless a vicious tendency in this direction in 
the Ritschlian mysticism. If Christ is not revealed 
by the Spirit as a divine personality and transcend¬ 
ent, the true consciousness of the divine presence 
will soon be lost in vague dreamings, and the 
sense of responsibility will be supplanted by mystic 
speculations, pietistic conceits, and ultimate world¬ 
liness. That we find men insisting at once on an 
immanent God and an absentee Christ is one of 
the most preposterous and sorrowful perversions 
of human thought. It is not affirmed that the ad¬ 
vocates of the doctrine of the divine immanence are 
pantheists; the most of them are not, for they be¬ 
lieve also in the personality of God, and that he is 
the ground and cause of the world of matter and 
finite mind. But the pantheistic side of the truth 
has often been overworked, and there has not 
always been sufficient care to guard against the 
world-old vice of entangling the Deity with the vis¬ 
ible world, and so of encouraging one of the most 
subtle and illusive forms of idolatry — the placing 


46 


The Person of Christ 


of something, no matter what, between the soul 
and the personal God; it is the obstructing of the 
approach to God. A heart may be at once at en¬ 
mity with God and yet in a manner feeling after 
him; it is then ready to accept some visible or other 
form in a sort of false worship. It lacks the skill 
to discern the Revealer, the true Son of God, and 
so to disentangle the Maker from the thing made. 

I am, therefore, unable to sympathize with the oft- 
repeated expression of the advocates of the doctrine 
of immanence: “We believe in a God everywhere 
present, not an absentee God, as did the old theo¬ 
logical thinkers.” The history of theological think¬ 
ing does not encourage the smart formula; and, 
what is worse, it assumes that God can be omni¬ 
present only as he is immanent. This is untrue, for 
Christ is both omnipresent and transcendent. Dr. 
Lyman Abbott, in his “ Theology of an Evolution¬ 
ist,” says: “ The current theology is of Roman ori¬ 
gin. It assumes as an axiom a God apart from the 
universe, and ruling over it, as a Roman emperor 
was apart from the empire and ruled over it.” Of 
course he holds that the belated thinkers are teach¬ 
ing the doctrine of an “ absentee ” as distinct from 
a “ resident ” God. When we reflect that the clear¬ 
est possible affirmations of the doctrine of imma- 




The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 47 

nence are to be found in the writing's of Augustine 
and Aquinas, and that their teachings on the subject 
have been firmly believed by the Roman Catholic 
Church and by the Reformers continuously to the 
present time, we must account Dr. Abbott’s state¬ 
ment one of the most conspicuous literary blunders 
that have been perpetrated by the “ liberal ” school 
to which it is his pride to belong. But Augustine 
and Aquinas knew how to hold the truths of im¬ 
manence and transcendence in even poise, and 
thus not to destroy the possibility of religion and 
worship by a partially disguised pantheism. Dr. 
Franklin J ohnson, in his instructive book on “ The 
Christian’s Relation to Evolution ” (p. 20) gives 
the following bit of interesting experience. He 
says: “ I was once in a class-room of a theological 
school when the Professor was examining a student 
in systematic theology. He readily drew from the 
student the statement that the older theologians 
taught the doctrine of an ‘ absentee God,’ a God 
merely transcendent. A visitor asked the student 
if the older theologians taught the omnipresence of 
God, and received the answer that they did. He 
then asked the student how an omnipresent God 
can be an ‘ absentee God,’ but received no answer 
either from the student or the Professor who had 


48 


The Person of Christ 


instructed him. He then asked further how an 
omnipresent God can fail to be immanent, but to 
this question again he received no answer.” The 
fact is that a true doctrine of immanence maintains 
steadfastly the dualism of God and nature; failing 
to keep this real and fundamental distinction, many 
in attempting to make all divine have left nothing 
divine. Their God is lost in the meshes of a cos- 
mical causality. Dr. M. Valentine, in his book on 
“ Natural Theology ” (p. 257), quotes an old Latin 
formula which presents the true view of the relation 
of God to nature in a form both compact and clear: 

“ Super cuncta, subter cuncta, 

Extra cuncta, intra cuncta; 

Intra cuncta, nec inclusus, 

Extra cuncta, nec exclusus; 

Super cuncta, nec elatus, 

Subter cuncta, nec substratus; 

Super totus, praesidendo, 

Subter totus, sustinendo.” 

Perhaps this old Middle Age formula expresses the 
truth of the relations of transcendence and imma¬ 
nence as nearly as any of our modern speculations. 
It guards against a one-sided view of transcendence 
which leads to deism, and an equally one-sided view 
of immanence which lands our thought in panthe¬ 
ism. After all a clear grasp by faith of the ever 





The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 49 

present, yet transcendent Christ, the very image of 
the substance of the Father, is the soul’s true refuge 
and place of rest. 

3. But, again, Christ is revealed not only as 
everywhere and transcendent, but by the Spirit’s 
disclosure his presence is power. Slowly enough 
does the world learn the lesson that all power is 
from God. And in moral and spiritual things the 
channel of that power to a soul is the written and 
the living Word. By the sacred Record and the 
living Christ the deep things of God are shown to 
the soul, and by them does the mind come under the 
mysterious power of a divine impression. This is 
the enduement of the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit 
never energizes apart from the Word and the 
Christ. When Christ was about to withdraw his 
visible presence from the disciples, in committing 
his ministry to them, he warned them against going 
forth in their own strength. “ He charged them 
not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the 
promise of the Father, which, said he, ye heard 
from me: for John indeed baptized with water; but 
ye shall be baptized in the Holy Spirit not many 
days hence. . . . But ye shall receive power, when 
the Holy Spirit is come upon you” (Acts i. 4-8). 
Not a hand were they to put forth, and not a ser- 


50 


The Person of Christ 


mon were they to utter until they should be “ clothed 
with power from on high.” Paul in writing to the 
church at Rome said, “ I am not ashamed of the 
gospel; for it is the power of God unto salvation 
to every one that believeth ” (Rom. i. 1-16). He 
speaks also of abounding “ in hope, in the power of 
the Holy Spirit.” But the most obvious truths are 
often the most neglected: it is always so when those 
truths contravene a life of lust and self-indulgence. 

But in respect of three things Christ was at pains 
to guard against mistake: (1) That at the intro¬ 
duction of Christianity no human resource would 
be adequate to prevail against the oppositions of the 
then existing forms of sin. To break the power of 
haughty and self-sufficient Caesar, the inveterate 
antagonisms and hate of Jewry, and to vivify the 
stolid and unquickened despair of heathenism, was 
to be a work, not of man, but of the living God. 
And what was true at the beginning has been true 
in all Christian history. No human arm can be 
successfully wielded against the inveterate deprav¬ 
ity of the human heart when that heart “ is fully 
set to do evil.” (2) The conquering power in re¬ 
ligion is not in a mere theory or a doctrine. Doc¬ 
trine is essential, but it must be steadily and con¬ 
stantly translated into life. This resolution is ever 



The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 51 

the work of the omnipresent Christ, for he is the 
resolution of all fatal doubting. The head may 
hold a sound doctrine of the person and work of 
Christ, while the heart is empty of his personal in¬ 
spiration and power. (3) This power of the om¬ 
nipresent Christ and the cross belongs to the “ inner 
man.” The Spirit takes the things of Christ and 
shows them to souls within in a divine unfolding 
and informing. And so the weak may confound the 
mighty. The humblest saint with the indwelling 
Christ, received in the faith of a child, is more than 
the mighty in worldly place, wisdom, and splendor. 
The ministry of power is ever the service of man 
with the indwelling Christ. Sad is the case of the 
preacher who has nothing but himself and his spec¬ 
ulations to unfold and proclaim. Spiritual strength 
may be made perfect in worldly weakness. “ God 
chose the weak things of the world, that he might 
put to shame the things that are strong.” 

4. And, finally, the doctrine of the omnipresent 
Christ is the exposition of the work of sanctifica¬ 
tion. What is sanctification but the receiving of 
Christ in all of his offices for the forgiveness of our 
sins and the healing of our depraved spirits ? Christ 
is our sanctification. It is doubtless true that much 
of the discussion in regard to Christian perfection 


52 


The Person of Christ 


in this life has been unprofitable. If in some cases 
the assumption of the possibility of perfection here 
has led to renewed aspiration, vigilance, and faith; 
in others, it is to be feared, it has resulted in lower¬ 
ing the standards of the true righteousness, un¬ 
healthful and self-conscious introspection, and spir¬ 
itual pride. We must, however, firmly maintain the 
truthfulness of the revealed fact that Christ is able 
to “ save unto the uttermost,” and that if in any¬ 
thing we fall short, the failure is in ourselves and 
not in him. Probably we may profitably dismiss the 
question whether we have actually attained the state 
of abiding holiness, while we constantly strive to 
reach unco the measure of “ the fulness of the bless¬ 
ing of Christ.” 

And for such striving we have the amplest 
encouragement. One of the strongest biblical ar¬ 
guments for the deity of Christ is found in the 
analysis of the names by which he is called. The 
absurdity of applying them to any other becomes 
obvious on the slightest inspection. The humani¬ 
tarian philosopher is wary of his Bible and the in¬ 
terpretation of it. But the matter of consequence 
to us is not some speculative consideration, but the 
entirely practical one, that every name suggests a 
unique and saving relation which Christ sustains to 




The Person of Christ and the Holy Spirit 53 

the soul receiving him in that relation. He offers, 
not a theory, but himself to the cliency of a simple 
faith. Sanctification, therefore, is the receiving of 
the Christ in all of his offices and relations. And in 
the last analysis this is also spirituality. When we 
attempt to obey the Pauline command “ Be filled 
with the Spirit,” we sometimes conceive of the 
Spirit’s incoming under the image of a physical in¬ 
pouring, and regard the Spirit’s work as changing 
the substance of the soul, or at least as changing 
our dispositions by a kind of physical impact. This 
cannot be so; and spirituality is ever the bringing 
of the things of the divine Lord to the conscious¬ 
ness, and the receiving of them in joyful submis¬ 
sion and faith. Spirituality apart from a divine 
Revealer, the very Christ, is inconceivable. Christ 
himself said, referring to the work of the Spirit, 
“ He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, 
and shall declare it unto you ” (John xvi. 14). 

The classic discussion of the subject of sanctifi¬ 
cation may be found in the theological work of 
President Finney. In this discussion he has sug¬ 
gested and elucidated sixty-one of the names by 
which the nature and work of Christ are set forth 
in the Bible, and shown how each one of these 
names indicates a way in which Christ is to be re- 


54 


The Person of Christ 


ceived in the work of convicting, quickening, and 
sanctifying the spirit receiving him in faith. The 
Spirit’s work in sanctification is shown to be the 
taking of the things of Christ in the relations indi¬ 
cated, and through faith making them efifective unto 
convicting, renewing, cleansing, and establishing in 
holiness. He is offered to us, for example, as king, 
mediator, advocate, justification, judge, repairer of 
the breach, priest, bread and water of life, as dying 
for us, as risen for our justification, and so on 
through the surprising list, in which the Word al¬ 
most agonizes to awaken attention, enkindle hope, 
and proffer divine aid to our sin and infirmity. The 
table of blessing is fully spread, and all things have 
been made ready for the soul’s repast; how strange 
the infatuation that so few are willing to sit by! 


CHAPTER IV 


THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND THE 
BOOK 

The one hundred and nineteenth Psalm is among 
the latest of the Hebrew writings. Its exact date 
is not known, nor do we know the name of the 
author of it. The evidences suggest that it was 
written after the return from the captivity, and 
therefore the Old Testament scriptures, essentially 
complete as we have them, must have been in exist¬ 
ence and widely circulated. This Psalm gives the 
estimate which the people of Israel put upon their 
sacred writings, and Paul mentions among their 
advantages, “ first of all, that they were intrusted 
with the oracles of God” (Rom. iii. 2). 

It would be interesting to study the literary form 
of this Psalm, but that for the present must be 
passed. Not, however, must we omit to note what 
some great minds have thought of it. In the Ger¬ 
man translation of the Bible the Psalm has this 
unique and admirable title: “ The Christian’s golden 
A. B. C. of the praise, love, virtue, and usefulness 
of the Word of God; for here is set forth in inex¬ 
haustible fulness what the Word of God is to man, 


58 


The Person of Christ 


changes which have grown into prominence in the 
last few years. These changes stated briefly are: 
First, a decay of belief in the supernatural; second, 
the disintegration of the Bible; third, new views 
respecting inspiration; and, fourth, a loss of the 
sense of accountability.” The President adds, 
“ These four changes are all shoots from a common 
root, and that root is doubt as to whether God has 
ever had any communication with men.” 1 To put 
the fact in brief words, there is prevalent doubt in 
regard to the old belief in a supernatural revelation, 
and as to whether we have a book which is a trust¬ 
worthy record of such a revelation. I suppose that 
the careful student of current conditions, if he has 
the “ open mind ” which it is fashionable to recom¬ 
mend, must give instant assent to President Nor- 
throp’s analysis. And the case has its serious as¬ 
pects. Daniel Webster, at a banquet once given in 
his honor, was asked by a guest, “ Mr. Webster, 
what is the greatest thought that ever entered your 
mind ? ” The statesman and philosopher, having 
been assured that all present were his friends, re¬ 
plied, “ My personal accountability to God ”; and 
then followed an unfolding of so great eloquence 
‘President Cyrus Northrop, in an address before the 
National Council of Congregational Churches, at their 
Thirteenth Triennial Session (1907). 


The Person of Christ and the Book 59 

and power that the repast was forgotten, and the 
company separated under the spell of a mighty im¬ 
pression. It is safe to say that a loss of the sense 
of accountability is one of the surest signs of moral 
deterioration. Woe to the preacher that saves the 
people, not from their sins, but from the fear of 
the fact and the consequences of sinning, and 
a sense of the solemnities of the last dreadful assize. 
Nothing sooner than a disintegrated Bible and an 
eviscerated theology will destroy that special eth¬ 
ical sense. Great moral reforms arise from the 
wielding of the great truths with power; and, on 
the other hand, doctrinal improvements that will 
stand the tests of mature thought and experience 
cannot be looked for in times when spiritual life is 
declining, and the objects of faith become shadowy 
in the social consciousness. It has been noted that 
the great Augsburg Confession has no special arti¬ 
cle to define the nature of the Bible. But the great 
Lutheran symbol has the significant statement that 
its articles are “ drawn from the Holy Scriptures 
and the pure Word of God.” The Protestant 
Bible and the Protestant life were bound together 
in a common experience. 

In the middle of the changes already noted are 
two in regard to the Bible: one the fact of disin- 


60 


The Person of Christ 


{ 

tegration, and the other concerning inspiration. If 
the belief shall prevail that the Bible is a miscella¬ 
neous aggregation of writings, having a purely 
naturalistic origin, and not a Book, given at sundry 
times and in divers portions indeed, yet with one 
central thought, that of redemption, running stead¬ 
ily through all under the guiding of the infinite 
Intelligence; and if it shall come to be believed that 
inspiration is only the enthusiasms of men of nat¬ 
urally religious genius, and not in any sense an 
inbreathing by the Spirit of God; then the rest will 
follow — the decay of belief in the supernatural, 
and a loss of the sense of accountability in any con¬ 
straining significance. The prevalence of the two 
middle facts which President Northrop discerns 
will eventuate in the prevalence of the extremes. 
The Bible is so essentially the source of those 
teachings, instrumentalities, and manifold energies 
through which religion is kept alive, and from 
which piety derives its nutriment, that neglect of 
its instruction and inspiration is surely followed by 
loss of ethical soundness, religious fervor, and cor¬ 
rect doctrinal thought. From it essentially alone 
we learn what is God, what man, and what lies 
beyond the grave. Its unique character is such that 
the statements of the great historical creeds which 


The Person of Christ and the Book 


61 


declare it to be the Word of God and in a deep and 
true sense inspired of God become easily credible. 

It is a present fashion to find, not only religious 
life, but also religious thought, concentric in the 
person of Christ. This is well. And it becomes 
pertinent to inquire what the Bible must be, on the 
assumption that the eternal and living Word has 
come to the world and become incarnate, and that 
the person Christ is really in a true though myster¬ 
ious sense God and man, or the God-man. Is 
there an essential bond between the living and the 
written Word? And is the root of the doubt 
whether we have a Word of God which is “ able 
to make wise unto salvation,” and which is 
an “ authoritative standard by which religious 
teaching and human conduct are to be regulated 
and judged,” is the root of the doubt really a skep¬ 
ticism concerning the divine nature of the person 
of Christ? If Christ is the divine incarnate Word, 
does that imply that the Bible is the divine written 
Word? The question deserves candid considera¬ 
tion. 

First of all, we need constantly to keep in mind 
that the saving power of the words and deeds of 
Jesus, and of the words and deeds of lawgivers and 
prophets, is grounded on what this matchless, 


62 


The Person of Christ 


unique being really is. Religion from the begin¬ 
ning until now is summed in the maintenance of 
right relations to the eternal Word. Religion is 
Christocentric, but Jesus is contemporary with all 
Bible history and all records of the history. When 
Paul is speaking of the baptism of the children of 
Israel unto Moses by cloud, and sea, and their 
feeding on the heavenly manna, he adds, “ They 
drank of a spiritual rock that followed them; and 
the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. x. 4). And the 
writer to the Hebrews says that Moses accounted 
“ the reproach of Christ greater riches than the 
treasures of Egypt” (Heb. xi. 26). Now this 
means more than that the water from the rock 
symbolized Christ, and that Moses chose the Christ- 
like virtues; it implies Christ’s very presence as the 
“ angel of the church in the wilderness,” as the 
Rock of Ages, as the Jehovah that appeared to 
Abraham by the oaks of Mamre as he sat in the 
door of his tent in the heat of the day, and with 
whom he pleaded for the deliverance of Sodom, 
and so variously through the old history; it means 
the angel whom Moses might not provoke, “ for 
he will not pardon your transgression; for my 
name is in him” (Ex. xxiii. 21)—name, the very 
attributes of God. Even before the Word became 


The Person of Christ and the Book 63 

incarnate, “ all things connected with the admin¬ 
istration of the world were committed to him,” and 
in particular the mighty work of the World’s re¬ 
demption. “ The moment the apostolic church be¬ 
gan to look back upon Jesus,” says Professor Scott, 
“ they saw him to be the Son of Jehovah referred 
to in the second Psalm. To him the Old Testament 
saints prayed as the King beside Jehovah, who was 
to rule over the whole earth. Hence he was re¬ 
garded as the revealing Word of God who spoke 
through the prophets, before he appeared among 
men as the incarnate Word of God.” 1 With this 
thought all sound biblical exposition must agree, 
and to suppose that the work of Christ began with 
the birth at Bethlehem is error of the first magni¬ 
tude. The incarnation was but the beginning of 
the consummation. The thought of the Bible from 
the beginning to the end is fundamentally single, 
and the eternal personal Word is back of that 
thought. “ I take up this book which we call the 
Bible,” says Professor Julius H. Seelye, “ and 
whether I acknowledge its truth or not, I must at 
least confess its power. No other book has moved 
the world as this has done. I inquire into the se¬ 
cret of this, to discover which I am obliged to open 
1 Bible Student and Teacher, January, 1907, p. 27. 


64 


The Person of Christ 


the book and see what it contains; and I find in it 
really but one thought, — a thought, indeed, of in¬ 
comparable grandeur and innumerable relations, 
but which, itself, is as single as it is sublime. All 
through the Bible, I discover only what is involved 
in the great thought of redemption. Man’s need 
of redemption, and God’s copious provision for it, 
furnish the wonderful theme of this wonderful 
book.” 1 

From this it follows that the two Testaments, 
the Old and the New, are vitally one, and that 
Christ is the organizing factor in the unity of both. 
This is what Origen meant when he said “ that all 
Christian truth is to be traced to Christ, who spoke 
through the prophets and the apostles.” It is not 
doubted by any that in the New Testament we 
have biographies which give the facts of the life 
of Christ, and epistles which aim to expound the 
principles of the gospel which he came in person to 
bring to the world. We accept these writings as 
records of a divine revelation. But the Old Testa¬ 
ment was the Bible of Christ, and he» accepted it as 
we accept the New, as giving also records of the 
divine revelations which came to the world before 
his advent. To him the Old Testament was like 
1 Lectures to Educated Hindus, p. 100. 


The Person of Christ and the Book 


65 


his own person, in that it was both divine and hu¬ 
man. “ He and the scripture were equally divine 
and human,” and neither, to his thought, was the 
product of his times, the outcome of an evolution¬ 
ary process which by naturalistic forces emerged 
on the scene of history. He was the incarnate 
Word sent from God; the Bible was the written 
Word, also sent from God. His relations to the 
Scriptures were as vital as the divine-human rela¬ 
tions in his own person; hence we find as a matter 
of human experience, that the denial of the divine 
authority of either Word leads to the denial of the 
authority in the other. 

I am not unaware of the objection that the denial 
of the authority of the Book is not the same thing 
as to deny the authority of Christ. Here, it is 
claimed, we have a book written by imperfect men 
who lived in various conditions, many of them 
without intellectual culture, and belonging to many 
different ages. How can such an assemblage of 
writings have the authority of a single person, and 
he in unfathomable mystery both divine and hu¬ 
man? The question is a fair one. But let us as¬ 
sume that Christ is in fact and efficiency the Re¬ 
deemer of the world; that in him even from of old 
we have the full revelation of God, so that the one 


66 


The Person of Christ 


who has truly seen the Son has seen the Father; 
that in him life and immortality have been brought 
into the fullness of light; — assuming that all of 
this at sundry times and in divers portions has come 
to the world, how is this revelation in the Son to 
be made the permanent possession of the race? 
Surely tradition alone could not be depended on 
to preserve it. Memory is not always trustworthy, 
and in a race so imperfect as ours is prejudices, 
conceits, and sin would soon pollute the stream 
which was to convey the pure water from its orig¬ 
inal source. If there is a supernatural revelation, 
and if that revelation is to be preserved to the 
world, two conditions are essential: (1) that the 
revelation must undergo documentation; and (2) 
that the documentation must be authoritative. That 
is, it must utter a word which all souls are bound 
to obey. Here then is the believer’s claim. He 
starts with the assumptions that God has spoken to 
men; that Christianity is distinguished from all 
the other religions in that its initial is in the mind 
and heart of God, and that he has come to the race 
in a definitely divine way to redeem, save, sanctify, 
and bless; that the revelations of the divine way 
all culminate in Christ, and that those revelations 
have been written in a Book which has been 


The Person of Christ and the Book 67 


authenticated by absolutely competent authority; 
that in the final analysis Christ himself is the au¬ 
thority. To deny the authority of the Book, then, 
is to deny the authority of Christ. I suppose that 
it is a fact of mind, that the one who falters as 
to the authority of the sacred writings has a flimsy 
belief in regard to the person of Christ. 

The old doctrine of plenary inspiration is fairly 
involved in the belief that Christ is the fullness of 
the revelation of God, and that the Christ revealing 
is disclosed in the written Word. We need not 
stumble at this unless we halt at the belief that God 
has revealed himself at all. And if God has dis¬ 
closed himself, it is foolishness to assume that he 
has covered what he has attempted to reveal, or that 
he has filled his revelations with error to such an 
extent that plain and honest minds cannot find out 
what he intended to say. But the record bears 
witness to itself. Paul in his letter to Timothy 
says, “ Every scripture inspired of God is also 
profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction which is in righteousness ” (2 Tim. 
iii. 16). The participle rendered “ inspired of God ” 
is clearly circumstantial, and doubtless has a causal 
force. The passage more closely rendered would 
read, “ The total of scripture, since it is inspired 


68 


The Person of Christ 


\ 


of God, is also profitable,” etc. And this is in har¬ 
mony with Christ’s own affirmation, “ that the 
scripture cannot be broken ”; also, that “ these are 
they which bear witness of me.” To the disciples 
on the road to Emmaus, “ Beginning with Moses 
and all the prophets, he interpreted in all the scrip¬ 
tures the things concerning himself.” Here we 
have the authority of Christ himself for the safe 
documentation of the old writings, and if of the 
old, yet more of the new. From the earliest times 
it has been the accepted doctrine of the orthodox 
world, that the sacred writings have been imposed 
on the church by absolutely competent authority; 
and in respect to the New Testament, that au¬ 
thority is none other than Christ himself through 
the apostles, the agents selected for the founding 
of his church. Apostolic indorsement and imposi¬ 
tion was the test constantly employed in the forma¬ 
tion of the New Testament canon; and to wrest 
these writings was an ofifense the same as to wrest 
the other scriptures. Thus again it appears that 
the disintegration of the written Word must also 
involve the disintegration of the Incarnate Word. 
If we have no divinely authoritative Bible, we have 
no Christ who spoke with authority, and not as a 
merely human scribe. The Bible is history, but it 


The Person of Christ and the Book 69 


is also more. It is literature, but yet more than 
that. It is even more than a history and a litera¬ 
ture in which Christ is revealed. It itself is an in¬ 
tegral part of those redemptive acts by which God 
has made himself known to the world, and by 
which he is to conquer the world unto himself. To 
say that God did not come into the world to make a 
book is weak. He came into the world to inaugu¬ 
rate a mighty scheme for the salvation of a race; 
and the making of a book, if one chooses to put it 
so, was one important element in his redemptive 
instrumentalities. How shall the Christ be medi¬ 
ated to a soul ? We say, By the disclosures of the 
Holy Spirit. But here again we meet the fact that 
the Spirit himself employs the Book as his instru¬ 
ment in conversion, in growth in grace, and in sanc¬ 
tification. That egoism which' aims to grope a way 
to God by some fancied inspirations apart from the 
Spirit who works through the truth, easily becomes 
fanatical or even disgusting. In short, the neglect 
of the Book is the denial and loss of the Christ. 
Truth and life belong together, and neither will 
abide without the other. 

“ Errors in life breed errors in the brain, 

And these reciprocally those again.” 

If it shall be replied that on this theory the Bible 


70 


The Person of Christ 


should be perfect and infallible, we need not be 
dismayed. For most it will prove easier to accept 
the plenary inspiration and infallibility of the sa¬ 
cred writings than that of a body of destructive 
critics who aspire to float their wisdoms under the 
uncertified label of modern scholarship. But after 
all, is not the Bible a perfect book, in the sense, as 
the late formula puts it, of constituting “ the au¬ 
thoritative standard by which religious teaching 
and human conduct are to be regulated and 
judged”? When the question is asked, What is 
perfect? the proper interrogatory follows, Perfect 
for what? The wise answer is, Perfect for its 
uses. We can concede that the Scriptures are not 
perfect for kindling the fires of the baths of 
Mohammedan fanatics; neither to regulate the 
thought: of rationalistic criticism; nor as a fe¬ 
tish for idolatrous, indolent, religious sentiment. 
Neither in such a sense is Christ perfect. As he 
is a divine-human personality, so the Book is at 
once both divine and human. The divine in each is 
mediated through the human, and a supernatural 
message can come to the soul in no other con¬ 
ceivable way. As Gladstone has well said, “ The 
memories of men, and the art of writing, and the 
care of the copyist, and the tablet and the rolls of 


The Person of Christ and the Book 71 


parchment, are but the secondary and mechanical 
means by which the Word has been carried down 
to us along the river of the ages; and the natural 
and inherent weakness of these means is in reality 
a special tribute to the grandeur and vastness of 
the end, and of him who wrought it out.” 1 Do 
we say that we have not a perfect Lord, because 
he had a body of human flesh ? As human he hun¬ 
gered, was weary, tempted, and, so far as we know, 
in his childhood and youth afflicted with bodily 
pains and sicknesses. But all the more for these 
very things he is our Saviour and Lord; our Re¬ 
deemer, Sympathizer, and Friend. As he dwelt 
in the flesh, yet came to us outside of the ordinary 
course of history; so the Bible is human in struct¬ 
ure, but the very Word of God in authority and 
power, given forth from himself from a throne 
whose foundations are the realities of the eternal 
scene. Neither Christ nor the Book is the product 
of naturalistic forces and processes. 

ir The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, p. 6. 


CHAPTER V 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND 
REDEMPTION 

The most important question ever asked by one 
person of another was that of the Philippian jailer, 
who in his terror cried out to Paul and Silas, 
“ Sirs, what must I do to be saved ? ” And the 
answer of Paul for wisdom and assurance has 
stood the test of the most candid and scrutinizing 
thought and the deepest experience of the human 
race: “ Believe on the Lord, and thou shalt be 

saved ” (Acts xvi. 30, 31). This is the question of 
questions, and the answer implies the deepest prob¬ 
lem concerning the ways of God in his approach to 
man; for in it is the fact and the implied philosophy 
of redemption. In general the problem of redemp¬ 
tion is simple; for it is nothing other than the re¬ 
covery of sinners from their sin and estrangement 
from God, the establishing of them in righteous¬ 
ness, and the bestowment upon them of pardon, 
peace, and life. The means of accomplishing this can 
also be reduced to a simple statement; for it is noth¬ 
ing other than Christ and the cross. “ Forasmuch 
as ye know that ye were not redeemed with cor- 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 73 

ruptible things, as silver and gold, ... but with the 
precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without 
blemish and without spot” (1 Peter i. 18-19). 
But how Christ and his sacrifice effect the stu¬ 
pendous work of salvation is a problem involving 
difficulties not entirely easy of solution. The 
Scriptures with great clearness and emphasis pre¬ 
sent the fact of redemption; the philosophy they 
do not attempt to unfold. Paul explicitly declared 
that “ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the 
law” (Gal. iii. 13); that he “died for our sins” 
(1 Cor. xv. 3) ; that “ the word of the cross is .... 
the power of God ” (1 Cor. i. 18) ; and that in his 
preaching he will have but one object of knowledge 
and one source of motive, namely, “ Jesus Christ 
and him crucified” (1 Cor. ii. 2). Yet, as Pro¬ 
fessor George B. Stevens says, “ For the phi¬ 
losophy of religion Paul carries us only to the 
beginning, and not to the end, of the problem of 
the atonement to which his own principles give 
rise.” 1 

The chief work of Christ should be contem¬ 
plated from two points of view: (1) from the ne¬ 
cessity of a ground or scheme by which forgiveness 
becomes possible, safe, and comprehensive of the 
'Theology of the New Testament, p. 415. 


74 


The Person of Christ 


forces of reconciliation; and (2) from the stand¬ 
point of the soul itself, namely, to discover in what 
way the regeneration forces in a divine Saviour 
become practically effective in restoring that soul 
from its estrangement and sin to justification and 
life. To the first of these points attention is now 
directed; the second will be considered in the next 
chapter. But the question of atonement is to be 
considered only in so far as shall appear necessary 
to show that for its accomplishment a divine person 
must have wrought in it, and that that person is 
Jesus, the Christ of God; to show that no work of 
redemption is possible without the sufferings of a 
divine Redeemer, and that the Redeemer is the 
Christ “ who his own self bore our sins in his own 
body on the tree ” (1 Peter ii. 24). 

A plan of redemption, whatever our theory of it 
nay be in detail, must presuppose certain facts and 
principles which explain its necessity and suggest 
the forms of its manifestation and procedure. To 
those essential principles attention is directed as 
follows: 

1. And first of all is the greatness of man. 
“ How much then is a man of more value than a 
sheep ? ” said Christ in his discussion with the 
Pharisees concerning the Sabbath; and the implica- 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 75 

tion is that he has more value than all sheep, or 
than all other created things. We often dwell on 
the greatness of his intelligence, or on that capacity 
for blessedness whose fullness is reached only in 
eternity; but greater than these is the mysterious 
power of freedom, the capacity to choose between 
right and wrong. By this he is made capable un¬ 
der the divine direction to construct a character, 
a life, which is a greater achievement than the 
making of a material world. Free intelligence is 
the supreme attribute of created being, and man in 
the possession of it is most of all in the image of 
God. It is inconceivable that God should bestow a 
greater power on any object of his creative intel¬ 
ligence and energy. 

2. But the greater the being, the more appalling 
the disaster if he shall fall into ruin. Notwith¬ 
standing our sweet sentimentalities, the world still 
stands aghast at the death of a soul. The appalling 
fact of depravity and guilt confronts us on every 
hand. It calls forth our best vigilance to withstand 
its aggressions; it keeps our fears awake; it haunts 
us in our dreams; it crowds on the capacities of our 
jails and prisons, and it strews our battle-fields with 
its myriads of slain. Or, if we shut our eyes to the 
world and turn our thought within, a wilderness of 


76 


The Person of Christ 


disaster meets our introspection. Of man’s need 
as finite and insufficient unto himself; as miserable, 
ever in the shadow of death with its forebodings 
of despair unless deliverance from beyond himself 
shall arise; as restless after filling himself to the 
utmost with the pleasures of the world; — of these 
things the race and every individual in it is ever 
conscious. But there is an experience deeper and 
more solemn than any one or all of these; namely, 
that of moral unworthiness, of conscious bondage, 
and a crying need of deliverance from self-accusa¬ 
tion by a hand more mighty than the world’s re¬ 
sources can offer. “ The whole world is guilty 
before God.” And it is a fundamental mistake to 
suppose that this experience belongs only to some 
exceptional cases of startling depravity: it belongs 
to all who have not been delivered by a divine hand 
from the condemnation of the “ law.” “ The sense 
of unworthiness is not a morbid experience,” says 
Dr. George Park Fisher. “ It is not confined to 
transient moods; it is not limited to men of excep¬ 
tional depravity; it does not belong to men of the 
spiritual elevation of Pascal and Luther, of Au¬ 
gustine and Edwards; it does not pertain to one 
nation exclusively, or any single branch of the 
human family; it is not an artificial product of 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 77 

the teaching of Christianity, or of any other of 
the religions that have prevailed on the earth. It 
is a human experience, giving, therefore, the most 
diversified manifestations of its presence in con¬ 
fessions of individuals, in poetry, and in other 
forms of literature, in penances, sacrifices, and other 
rites of worship.” 1 Of the origin of this startling 
fact it is needless here to inquire; whether all 
sinned in Adam, or inherited a depraved nature 
of such sort that its solicitations would inevitably 
lead us into voluntary transgression like that of 
our great progenitor. The fact stands in all of its 
appalling hideousness. We are sinful, estranged 
from God, the filial bond to him being severed, 
and thus we are included under the solemn con¬ 
demnation : “ He that believeth not is condemned 
already, because he hath not believed in the name 
of the only begotten Son of God” (John iii. 18). 
The sense of estrangement, unworthiness, and of 
bondage, vague or insistent, is a world experience. 
It passes through the gamut of ethical emotion 
from the slightest tinge of feeling to the worst 
manifestations in remorse. 

It is not pertinent to the present inquiry to raise 
the question whether the depravity of a person 

1 Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief, p. 93. 


78 


The Person of Christ 


unrenewed by grace is total or partial. If virtue 
is a unit, as we are coming more and more clearly 
to see, it follows from a logical necessity that a 
man cannot be both right and wrong in the same 
act; both for and against God in any momentary 
state. But let that pass. Men, even wicked men, 
are still human, and the vigor of our constitutional 
humanity, especially in civilized society, may be 
expected to assert itself and reveal natural traits 
which are comely, charged with sound sense, and 
lovable. But a constitutional trait is one thing; a 
fundamental moral state is quite another. Men 
may be radically different in moral character, while 
they are alike in outward acts, and in feelings, 
thoughts, and proximate purposes. “ The good 
man is not an angel in ecstatic emotion and exalted 
view, and the bad man is not a demon in malignant 
feeling and malicious purpose.” But the taint of 
sin has done its pervasive mischief, and “ the mind 
of the flesh is enmity against God ” (Rom. viii. 7) ; 
“For there is no distinction; for all have sinned, 
and fall short of the glory of God ” (Rom. iii. 22, 
23) ; “ If we say that we have no sin [or have not 
sinned], we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not 
in us ” ( 1 John i. 8). 

3. There is a somewhat prevalent habit of look- 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 79 

ing upon sin as a kind of physical taint, coming 
upon us by irresistible mechanical, evolutionary 
forces, and corrupting our natures in spite of our 
planning and volitions. In this view we are the 
creatures of a cruel fate, and our deliverance is im¬ 
possible unless the remorseless nature that has 
brought us into the trouble shall relent and work 
out the problem of our recovery. But this thought 
is unsound, and the prevalence of it tends only to 
the mischief of heathenish moral stolidity. Sin is 
a matter of law, called “ lawlessness ” by John, the 
preeminent seer of the apostles; and the origin of 
it is ever an act of the subject’s free choice. The 
mischief of sin is revealed in the fact that it is, as 
lawlessness, an invasion of all interests both indi¬ 
vidual and general. The value of law is measured 
by the worth of the interests it is calculated to con¬ 
serve, and the law transgressed in sinning is that 
which protects the well-being of God and the uni¬ 
verse. It is a serious matter to transgress the law 
of the country or of the commonwealth; it is an 
offense of infinitely graver consequence to trans¬ 
gress the law of an eternal kingdom, the kingdom 
of God. Sin is at once the undoing of the sinner 
and the invasion of interests incomprehensibly vast 
and sacred. 


80 The Person of Christ 

It is sometimes assumed that God made the 
worlds and all the moral intelligences therein, and 
then imposed upon them a set of rules after the 
dictates of his infinite wisdom and will, adding 
rewards for obedience and punishments for dis¬ 
obedience in such manner and form as would best 
secure the individual and general well-being. But 
this is not the truth about the origin of law. The 
moral law is a law of nature, and springs into be¬ 
ing as soon as moral beings exist. Newton did 
not impose the law of gravitation on the material 
world, neither did God himself; God made the 
world, and from its own nature every part thereof 
instantly began to gravitate. As in the material 
world, so in the moral: the interests come first 
and the law growing out of them arises by a neces¬ 
sity resident in their own nature. The moral law 
is a law of both reason and nature, and it came 
into being when the first moral beings appeared on 
the creative scene. That God accepts it, proclaims 
it as the law of the moral universe, and adds to it 
the authority of his will, does not alter the fact of 
its origin. It would have existed all the same, if 
there had been no Sinai, and if no Divine Teacher 
had announced the principle on which “ the whole 
law hangeth, and the prophets.” Here we begin to 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 81 

see the need of a divine deliverer for the trans¬ 
gressor; he must be saved, but not less the world 
order which his sin has assailed. As the moral 
order has value, as the interests which law secures 
are immeasurably vast, as the throne of God must 
stand as against universal anarchy and moral 
chaos: so must there be a plan broad and deep 
enough to recover the transgressors, and to lay 
foundations so secure that the mutations of eternity 
cannot shake them. 

4. There is another fact of which a redemptive 
plan must take account, which it is dangerous to 
ignore, to minimize, or to misconceive — the fact 
of guilt. Of this dreadful fact all humanitarian 
schemes for the recovery and progress of the race 
make too little; and there is confusion in the gen¬ 
eral thought concerning the relations of sin and 
guilt. Sin is not guilt, as is often supposed, but 
is the antecedent act from which guilt arises. Sin 
is a free act of transgression; guilt is the moral 
state that accompanies the transgression.’ Every 
moral act is followed by a moral judgment of 
approval or disapproval, of good- or ill-desert. 
This judgment is wholly ethical, and cannot be 
analyzed or resolved into a judgment of wisdom 
or unwisdom, of utility or inutility, of esthetic 


80 


The Person of Christ 


It is sometimes assumed that God made the 
worlds and all the moral intelligences therein, and 
then imposed upon them a set of rules after the 
dictates of his infinite wisdom and will, adding 
rewards for obedience and punishments for dis¬ 
obedience in such manner and form as would best 
secure the individual and general well-being. But 
this is not the truth about the origin of law. The 
moral law is a law of nature, and springs into be¬ 
ing as soon as moral beings exist. Newton did 
not impose the law of gravitation on the material 
world, neither did God himself; God made the 
world, and from its own nature every part thereof 
instantly began to gravitate. As in the material 
world, so in the moral: the interests come first 
and the law growing out of them arises by a neces¬ 
sity resident in their own nature. The moral law 
is a law of both reason and nature, and it came 
into being when the first moral beings appeared on 
the creative scene. That God accepts it, proclaims 
it as the law of the moral universe, and adds to it 
the authority of his will, does not alter the fact of 
its origin. It would have existed all the same, if 
there had been no Sinai, and if no Divine Teacher 
had announced the principle on which “ the whole 
law hangeth, and the prophets.” Here we begin to 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 81 


see the need of a divine deliverer for the trans¬ 
gressor; he must be saved, but not less the world 
order which his sin has assailed. As the moral 
order has value, as the interests which law secures 
are immeasurably vast, as the throne of God must 
stand as against universal anarchy and moral 
chaos: so must there be a plan broad and deep 
enough to recover the transgressors, and to lay 
foundations so secure that the mutations of eternity 
cannot shake them. 

4. There is another fact of which a redemptive 
plan must take account, which it is dangerous to 
ignore, to minimize, or to misconceive — the fact 
of guilt. Of this dreadful fact all humanitarian 
schemes for the recovery and progress of the race 
make too little; and there is confusion in the gen¬ 
eral thought concerning the relations of sin and 
guilt. Sin is not guilt, as is often supposed, but 
is the antecedent act from which guilt arises. Sin 
is a free act of transgression; guilt is the moral 
state that accompanies the transgression.’ Every 
moral act is followed by a moral judgment of 
approval or disapproval, of good- or ill-desert. 
This judgment is wholly ethical, and cannot be 
analyzed or resolved into a judgment of wisdom 
or unwisdom, of utility or inutility, of esthetic 


82 


The Person of Christ 


propriety or impropriety. The wrong-doer passes 
this judgment on himself, and puts himself under 
the condemnation of his own conscience. He has 
entered the guilty state, and who shall deliver him 
from the weary load? He is guilty, not from the 
fact of continuance in sin, but from the fact of 
having committed sin. “ While the sinner exists,” 
says President James Fairchild, “ he must be guilty 
of every sin he has ever committed. The sin ren¬ 
ders him ill-deserving, and the ill-desert attaches 
to his personality, and can never be discharged. 

. . . Ill-desert is just as great after punishment as 
before.” 1 A sinner may be pardoned on proper 
conditions, restored to the favor of God, justified, 
and blest; but into the other world and the endless 
life he will carry his ill-desert, and his salvation 
will be conferred, not on the ground of merit, but 
by the infinite grace of God. 

It is a mistake, therefore, to assume that salva¬ 
tion cancels ill-desert or guilt. Guilt from its very 
nature is endless, and a divine redemption alone 
can deliver us from the consequences of it. If the 
statement that guilt is endless shall be challenged, 
a careful summary may make the case plain. If 
guilt can be extinguished, it must be done in some 
1 Moral Philosophy, p. 149. 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 83 


one or all of four ways: (1) by time; (2) by re¬ 
pentance; (3) by pardon; or (4) by the execution 
of penalty. But the murderer is equally a mur¬ 
derer after twelve months or years; repentance is 
sorrow for the sin, but does not cancel the guilt; 
pardon merely sets aside the penalty deserved; and 
punishment is an infliction of evil as an expression 
of guilt for the general good. The execution of 
the penalty does not annihilate the guilt; if it could, 
pardon would become a public impropriety. The 
question of redemption must take into account the 
universal fact of sin, and the appalling consequence 
that the race is enmeshed in every conceivable form 
of guilt. 

Thus we have before us the elements of our prob¬ 
lem: Man, the crown of God’s creations, besides 
whom there is nothing in the world really great; 
yet this same man in moral ruin by sin, estranged 
from God, lost to righteousness, and appalled by 
the forebodings of despair; and, furthermore also, 
involved in a guilt that attaches to his very per¬ 
sonality, and from which he can escape only by the 
annihilation of his being, for justification in ele¬ 
mentary meaning truly signifies the treating as 
just those who are unworthy. Whence then shall 
deliverance come? 


84 


The Person of Christ 


One may say that man has within himself the 
power of his own delivery. Such a one sometimes 
affirms that God can take care of his children and 
restore the world to righteousness without a Re¬ 
deemer, and the machinery of atonement by way 
of the cross. The Father love will win all to re¬ 
pentance and life. Analyzed to the bottom, the 
statement means that God can save and govern the 
world without the employment of means to that 
end; and the absurdity of the thought is sufficiently 
revealed when it is put into a formula of words. 
Of course those who deny the fact of depravity, 
that the wicked are already included under the ufti- 
versal condemnation, the endlessness of guilt, and 
the perils of eternal punishment, repudiate the doc¬ 
trine of atonement, and the most of them take the 
Socinian view of the nature of Christ; he was a 
mere man, though endued with superior wisdom 
by the fullest bestowment of the Spirit of God 
possible for man to receive. But the larger num¬ 
ber of those who maintain that man has within 
himself the resources for his own recovery deny 
the necessity of a supernatural revelation and a 
divine provision, and espouse some scheme of 
naturalism; a theory of culture, of reform, or of 
mechanical evolution. These various schemes it 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 85 

would be wearisome to discuss; but one vice com¬ 
mon to all of them it is needful to point out. They 
fail to discriminate between physical and moral 
law, and also between the natural consequences of 
our acts and penalties. It is common to hear the 
affirmation that the law executes itself and inflicts 
its own penalties. But natural consequences and 
penalties differ fundamentally in nature, and clear 
thought ever discriminates between them. 

As a matter of fact the word “ penalty ” has no 
proper meaning apart from moral government; and 
government always implies two parties — the gov¬ 
ernor and the governed. If there is no intelligent 
moral governor, there can be no such thing as pen¬ 
alty; and when we speak of natural physical con¬ 
sequences as penalty, we are talking in metaphor; 
as when we say that the trees clap their hands and 
sing. Penalty is evil inflicted by a properly consti¬ 
tuted authority, whose business it is to proclaim the 
law, the law of reason and nature, to publish sanc¬ 
tions, bring its subjects into conformity to duty, 
punish disobedience, and thus to promote the in¬ 
dividual and general welfare. Death is the effect, 
the natural consequence, of swallowing poison. If 
the death were penalty, it would be an infliction of 
evil for the act whether the swallowing were acci- 


86 


The Person of Christ 


dental, intentional, or maliciously caused by an 
enemy. If the natural consequences are penalty, 
then the world is constantly punishing the good for 
their goodness, as well as the bad for their badness; 
and such preposterous indiscrimination could have 
little in it to lead to righteousness and peace. The 
fireman who loses his life to save the lives of oth¬ 
ers, by the theory is paying the penalty for his 
heroic deed. The harm the drunkard brings upon 
himself by his inebriety is not penalty; for, but for 
the harm, the act would be morally innocent. Pres¬ 
ident Fairchild puts the case in the following com¬ 
pact and neat form: “We have then, the singular 
combination of a penalty attached to an innocent 
act, which becomes sinful on account of the an¬ 
nexed penalty.” 1 We ought to have learned by 
this time that penalty has no proper meaning in 
connection with physical law, and also that there 
is no sufficient redemptive force in the merely 
constitutive courses of the natural world. Praise 
Mother Nature and her beneficences as we may, 
the truth will still abide that redemptive forces and 
acts, of whatever kind they shall be, must be em¬ 
braced within the moral sphere. 

And not only must they be within the moral 


1 Moral Philosophy, p. 157. 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 87 


field; they must also be in their nature and power 
divine. Here Christianity is peculiar and distinct¬ 
ive. “ There are two kinds of religion, and only 
two,” says Professor Seelye. “ The one begins 
with man, and seeks, by human endeavors, after 
God; the other begins with God, and, by a way 
wholly divine, seeks after man. In this is the 
peculiarity of the Christian, in distinction from all 
other systems of religion; and, in the revelation of 
this doctrine, is the distinction of the Bible from 
all other books.” 1 The need of the world for sal¬ 
vation is the divine Presence within it, and the 
manifestations of that Presence in divine efforts 
unto recovery and life. This Presence we have, 
and it is none other than Christ himself and his 
cross. To the disciples, and before his ascension, 
he was present to sight as the very God incarnate; 
to the church universal and to individual Christian 
life, he is equally present as he is revealed in the 
Holy Spirit. Power in this poor, sin-stricken world 
is with those who live in the King’s country, and 
who see much of the Master’s face. 

The redemptive work of Christ presents itself to 
thought in two fundamental forms: First, as a 
scheme of motives by which those in sin, guilty 
1 Lectures to Educated Hindus, pp. 24r-25. 


88 


The Person of Christ 


before God and the world, may be won from present 
transgressions and infatuations, weaned from the 
lusts that have brought them into bondage, estab¬ 
lished in righteousness and in the walk of faith, 
and renewed in the hopes of eternal life; and, 
second, as a divine provision, consistent with 
the honor of God and safe for the interests of his 
government, by which the penalties of sin may be 
set aside, and the mischiefs arising from old trans¬ 
gressions averted. Thus the atonement presents 
itself as a subjective power in relation to the sin¬ 
ner; but equally as an objective ground for for¬ 
giveness on account of the nature and relations of 
moral beings. As the Congregational Commission 
Creed of 1883 phrases the thought, “ Whose sac¬ 
rifice of himself for the sins of the world declares 
the righteousness of God, and is the sole and 
sufficient ground of forgiveness and reconciliation 
with him.” The world is in greater need of 
motive than even of light; yet God must be just 
to every interest when he freely justifies the sinner. 
Here appears the necessity for a vicarious sacri¬ 
fice, one that can be made only by Deity himself. 
Forgiveness on the mere condition of repentance 
is known to be unsafe in human administrations; 
it is equally so in the divine. Forgiveness on the 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 89 

mere condition of repentance in practice is simply 
a solicitation to further sinning. The way of safe 
redemption is ever the way of the passion of the 
cross. “ To lay the stress of Christ’s revelation 
elsewhere than on the atoning cross is to make him 
no moire than a martyr, whose testimony was not 
given by his death, but only sealed by it.” 1 

The theories of redemption by the way of the 
atoning death of Christ naturally divide into two 
classes, according as they make prominent either 
one or the other of the two ideas described in the 
preceding paragraph. Yet, except in the Socinian 
view, which denies the deity of Christ and the 
need of a divine Saviour, all the theories agree in 
regarding the atonement as a work of God, into 
no part of which man as man may enter, and 
whose passion no human being can share or make 
more complete. When Paul speaks of filling up 
on his part that which is lacking of the afflictions 
of Christ, he had no thought that he was a sharer 
in the atonement made for the sin of the world; 
but he is thinking of what he must yet suffer for 
Christ for the sake of the church, which is Christ’s 
body. The first of the classes of theories has corn¬ 
er. P. T. Forsyth, in Lyman Beecher Lectures on 
Preaching (1907), p. 357. 


90 


The Person of Christ 


monly received the designation of the Moral In¬ 
fluence theory; the other theories maintain “ that 
there is a difficulty in the way of forgiving the 
sinner, aside from, or in addition to, the difficulty 
of bringing him to repentance.” That is, a divine 
motive power is needed, and something more. 
Dr. Bushnell in his eloquent work “ Vicarious Sac¬ 
rifice ” has presented the motives to repentance 
that gather about the cross with great complete¬ 
ness and power; yet he himself finally felt the 
inadequacy of his earlier view, and in his “ For¬ 
giveness and Law ” added to the former view the 
“ something more ” which, as he conceived, made 
forgiveness safe and proper. And this has been 
the common thought of those who have essayed 
to expound the philosophy of atonement; for this 
“ something more,” in whatever view, has been re¬ 
garded as a unique provision made by God himself 
for the redemption of the race. Forgiveness is “ not 
a matter of course ”; it is natural for God to for¬ 
give only because the provision for forgiveness is 
supernatural. As Dr. Forsyth profoundly re¬ 
marks : 

“ If sin be man’s fatal act, the cross is God’s 
vital act. But it is action we have to do with. It 
is will meeting will, yet not in transaction but in 


The Person of Christ and Redemption 91 


interaction. What slew Christ was an act of man, 
but it was for Him much more than an infliction 
and fate of which He was the passive martyr. It 
was an act on His side much more than on theirs; 
and an act, not of resignation, but of conquest ab¬ 
solute over both His own fate and ours. He was 
more active in His death than the world, the fate, 
the sin, which inflicted it. Rather, when we view 
things on the largest scale, we must reverse the 
positions. It was not His fate and the world’s act, 
it was His act and the world’s fate. The world’s 
condemnation of Him was His condemnation of 
the world — but a condemnation unto forgiveness 
and salvation. In the Cross the world was doomed 
to — salvation. All were shut up unto sin, that 
there might be mercy on all. The world’s one sin 
was made by grace the world’s one hope.” 1 

In whatever view, then, redemption is a divine 
work, and the Redeemer is a divine person. The 
plan of redemption in the divine Son by the way 
of his passion, reveals the holiness of God, and his 
care for the welfare of an eternal kingdom, his 
hatred of sin, his infinite pains to recover the sin¬ 
ner; and it brings in the motives by which repent¬ 
ance is induced, and the heart melts before the 
divine compassion. When the sinner comes to see 
that his own sinning erects a cross of suffering in 
1 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, pp. 359-360. 


92 


The Person of Christ 


the very heart of God, then, and only then, does 
his stubbornness completely relent, and he flees to 
Christ, the door wide open for all who in truth are 
penitent. Redemption is a plan, but even more 
truly it is a person. 

“ Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he 
saith, 

Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, 

But a body didst thou prepare for me; 

In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin 
thou hadst no pleasure: 

Then said I, Lo, I am come 

(In the roll of the book it is written of me) 

To do thy will, O God.” 


Hebrews x. 5-7. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND 
REGENERATION 

He only who thinks meanly of man can believe 
that any being other than God can explore the 
depths of our individual need. We know the 
world and measurably its resources; we are also 
aware, when we stop to think of the problem, that 
our necessities are immeasurably great; and, fur¬ 
ther also, we know that the world, if we put our 
trust in it, will prove inadequate and false. For 
God we are made, and the soul finds repose only 
as it rests in him. 

“ My heart is tossed, nor can it be 
At rest, till it finds rest in thee.” 

It was Gladstone who profoundly remarked, “All 
I write, all I think, and all I hope is based upon 
the divinity of our Lord, the one central hope of 
our poor wayward race.” 

This deep want of man for God arises from a nat¬ 
ural as well as from a moral necessity. We are finite 
and dependent, and insufficient unto ourselves. 
But as the imperfect is disclosed in the presence of 
the perfect, the ugly through the beautiful, and the 


94 


The Person of Christ 


sinful through the good; so the limitations and the 
possibilities of the finite and dependent are re¬ 
vealed to knowledge through the Infinite and the 
Absolute. The world did not know itself till 
Christ came to it, and the revelation is yet incom¬ 
plete because the Incarnate God is not yet fully 
incarnate in human life. Nevertheless, the light 
shines into the darkness. “ The world itself is 
changed,” says Dr. Bushnell, “ and is no more the 
same that it was; it has never been the same since 
Jesus left it. The air is charged with heavenly 
odors, and a kind of celestial consciousness, a sense 
of other worlds, is wafted on us in its breath.” 1 
From this consciousness of the nature, value, and 
deep necessities of man, of which we have quick¬ 
ened vision through him who came to bring life 
and immortality to light, have emerged all of the 
vast missionary work for the salvation of the lost, 
and those many philanthropies by which the hun¬ 
gry are fed, the sick and imprisoned visited, and 
the hosts of the sons of want blessed in loving min¬ 
istries. Here we see one reason for the crucial 
importance which the fathers without exception 
attached to the person of Christ. He was viewed, 
not as some chance individual arising in the his- 
1 Nature and the Supernatural, p. 331. 


The Person of Christ and Regeneration 95 


torical stream, but rather as a divine Person, stand¬ 
ing in essential relation to the race as a whole and 
to every individual in it, revealing God from 
above as well as the race to itself, an object of 
faith for all souls, and a harbinger of joys which 
are to have their consummation in other worlds. 

But only in the light of our moral necessities 
do we discover the inadequacy of the world’s re¬ 
sources, and the need of a divine helper, for the 
resolution of our perplexities, and for rescue from 
our enthralling bondage. The provisions in a 
mighty plan of redemption for a lost race have 
already been considered; attention must still be 
directed to the specific address to the individual 
soul which is provided in the redemptive scheme 
by way of the cross; in other words, to the need 
of a divine operation in order to our rescue from 
bondage and to our quickening in the life that is 
eternal. Nothing less than a divine Saviour can 
compass that process which we call regeneration. 
What skill and resource must guide and stay a 
soul in that sublime act when it passes “ out of 
death into life ” ? To pass from guilt to justifica¬ 
tion is the supreme moral act. Though simple it 
is not easy; though essential it is not desired; 
though in the order of nature it is also in the field 


96 


The Person of Christ 


of the supernatural. The worldling dreads it; the 
skeptic scouts it; and the sentimentalist minim¬ 
izes its importance and envelops the significance 
of its terms in sophistries. The thin schemes for 
the renewal of souls in times of religious declen¬ 
sion should be a shame, a warning, and a rebuke. 
When the concept of guilt has been emptied of sig¬ 
nificance, and justification is accounted as a prod¬ 
uct of mere human endeavor, then the process of 
social and individual degeneration has fully set in. 
Speaking of Luther’s conception of Christ as satis¬ 
fying both justice and love, Dorner adds: “ Lu¬ 

ther did honor to that truth which is bitter and 
humbling, and therefore it was possible for him to 
see the truth of the gospel in a new light. He en¬ 
tered uprightly and sincerely into the crushing 
and desolating sense of guilt, and not merely into 
the sense of misery or of finitude; and was enabled 
in consequence .to rise superior both to mystical 
attempts at self-annihilation, and to the false, that 
is, the negative and unproductive, ideas about the 
substitution of the divine for the human person¬ 
ality, which had been associated with these at¬ 
tempts.” 1 He thus found that in himself as a 
guilty personality, he was also “ an object of deep 
1 The Person of Christ, Division ii, vol. ii, p. 57. 


The Person of Christ and Regeneration 97 

and intense interest to God and his justice.” And 
this thought of Luther’s harmonizes with that of 
the great Augustine when he says, “ The begin¬ 
ning of knowledge is to know thyself to be a 
sinner.” 

Prominent among the words employed by Scrip¬ 
ture to describe the work of personal salvation are 
two; namely, regeneration and conversion. The 
former recognizes the agency of God, and the 
latter more specifically that of the subject himself; 
but both suggest one individual act when the true 
turning from sin to righteousness takes place. 
However we may explain the relations of the two 
agents concerned, it is conceded by all that both 
are essential to the completed act when the soul 
passes from death unto life. Neither can do its 
work without the other. Conversion implies re¬ 
generation, and regeneration is not successfully 
operative without conversion. Says Paul in his 
letter to Titus: “ But when the kindness of God 

our Saviour, and his love toward man, appeared, 
not by works done in righteousness, which we did 
ourselves, but according to his mercy he saved us, 
through the working of regeneration and renewing 
of the Holy Spirit, which he poured out upon us 
richly, through Jesus Christ our Saviour” (iiL 


98 


The Person of Christ 


4-6). Peter also speaks of our being begotten 
again “ unto a lively hope by the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter i. 3), and 
Christ himself told Nicodemus that all must be 
born anew (regenerated): “That which is born 
of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the 
Spirit is spirit” (John iii. 6). And he likened the 
coming of the Spirit to the blowing of the winds, 
whose going and coming no one can explain. Re¬ 
generation, then, or conversion in view of the 
human act in turning, implies a divine energy 
wrought within the soul itself. There can be no 
salvation without a divine Saviour whose self and 
efficiencies are conveyed to the soul within by the 
Holy Spirit of God. 

It is instructive to note the complete recognition 
of this fact by all evangelical thinkers from the 
beginning till the present time. Tertullian went 
so far as to say that in regeneration “ the grace of 
God is more potent than the will; the soul in its 
second birth is taken up by the Holy Spirit.” The 
Greek Fathers regarded the renewal of a soul as 
the result of a synergistic energy — there being 
two cooperating factors, divine grace and man’s 
free agency. The German Mystics taught that the 
birth of a soul resulted from the entrance of the 


The Person of Christ and Regeneration 99 

Divine Being into its inmost depths; Wesley, that 
regenerating grace is the primary and principal, 
though not irresistible, agent in conversion; the 
Younger Edwards, that regeneration is the divine 
communication of a new spiritual sense or taste 
preceding conversion; Dwight, the same; H. B. 
Smith, that it is the divine creation of an “ imma¬ 
nent preference,” which includes the affections and 
the will; Coleridge, that it is a deliverance by 
Christ from spiritual death; and Schleiermacher, 
that regeneration on the human side is conversion, 
but on the divine justification, by which God re¬ 
moves from our consciousness the sense of guilt 
and ill-desert. The movement of mind in the great 
reformation of the sixteenth century is instructive 
on the point we are considering. The Lutheran 
Confession starts from the wants of sinful man, 
and his need of supernatural deliverance; hence 
we find at the front in the great struggle the doc¬ 
trine of justification by faith alone. By this the 
church was to stand or fall. But the Reformed 
churches in their teaching start from the sover¬ 
eignty of God, the movement of thought being 
from God towards man — God coming forth for 
deliverance, rule, and the proffer of life. But both 
agree in the harmony of the subjective and the ob- 


100 


The Person of Christ 


jective principles as existing in an inseparable 
unity. In the hand-to-hand work of Luther it was 
natural for the mind to rest on the wants of man, 
and that it should pass from man to deliverance 
from God. He started with anthropology and 
passed thence to theology; but both Luther and 
the Reformers were in harmony as to the need of 
man, a necessity too profound to be reached by 
anything less than the grace offered in a divine 
Lord, Deliverer, and Comforter. Nothing less can 
satisfy the throbbing, weary, weeping, and sin- 
crushed heart of this poor world. 

To make the case yet more plain, it is to be 
noted that in the scriptural conception of the re¬ 
newing of a soul from spiritual death to newness 
of life, three agencies and one instrumentality co¬ 
operate and harmonize; and progressive evangel¬ 
ism must make due account of them all. 

1. On the human side the work of the preacher 
is recognized, and his function is esteemed of vast 
importance. Paul in his first letter to the Corin¬ 
thians says: “For though ye have ten thousand 
tutors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; 
for in Christ Jesus I begat you through the gos¬ 
pel ” (1 Cor. iv. 15). Or again, recognizing both 
the preacher and the truth his instrument, he says: 


The Person of Christ and Regeneration 101 


“ For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world 
through its wisdom knew not God, it was God’s 
good pleasure through the foolishness of the 
preaching [Greek, thing preached] to save them 
that believe” (1 Cor. i. 21). To the same intent, 
also, Paul writes to the Romans: “ How then 
shall they call on him in whom they have not be¬ 
lieved? and how shall they believe in him whom 
they have not heard? and how shall they hear 
without a preacher?” (Rom. x. 14). Christianity 
is a unique religion in that it can be preached, held 
forth through ambassadorial agency. Its propaga¬ 
tion demands the preacher. 

2. But the work of regeneration demands an 
agent more essential still, none other than God 
himself. Christ says: “ No man can come to me, 
except the Father that sent me draw him ” (John 
vi. 44) ; “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
will draw all men unto myself” (John xii. 32). 
But the worldly mind is reluctant to receive the 
gift of God. “Ye will not come to me that ye 
may have life” (John v. 40). 

3. And this last text reveals another agent, the 
third, namely the sinner himself. All of the calls 
of the Bible to repentance, its pleading invitations, 
its warnings, its threats, imply that the sinner him- 


102 


The Person of Christ 


self is a cooperative agent in regeneration. “ Re¬ 
pent ye therefore, and turn again, that your sins 
may be blotted out” (Acts iii. 19); “Let the 
wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man 
his thoughts; and let him return unto Jehovah, 
and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, 
for.he will abundantly pardon” (Isa. lv. 7). 

4. And with equal, if not indeed greater, em¬ 
phasis the Scriptures affirm that regeneration is 
accomplished through the instrumentality of the 
truth: “ Having been begotten again, not of cor¬ 
ruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the 
word of God, which liveth and abideth ” (1 Peter 
i. 23) ; “Of his own will he brought us forth by 
the word of truth, that we should be a kind of 
firstfruits of his creatures” (James i. 18). Jesus 
prays that his followers may be sanctified in 
(through) the truth, and adds, “ Thy word is 
truth” (John xvii. 17). We are taught that it is 
God that brings forth in us the new life, but not 
without the instrumentality of the truth. 

Thus is disclosed the harmony of operations in 
the work of regeneration; also, the danger of neg¬ 
lecting any one of the agencies and instrumentali¬ 
ties that cooperate in the gracious work. The 
preacher must bring the truth from the great store- 


The Person of Christ and Regeneration 103 

house of truth; the power of God must be sought, 
who takes the truth and makes it living in both 
preacher and hearer by the unfolding of the Holy 
Spirit; and the sinner must be persuaded to turn 
by his own free choice. In times when the drift 
of mind is toward naturalism, the divine factor in 
regeneration is likely to suffer neglect; but it is 
essential. Without it our religious activities as¬ 
sume bewildering forms, and our energies recoil 
upon themselves. Both before and after that su¬ 
preme choice which we call conversion, the Holy 
Spirit does its work, though not precisely in the 
same way. Coming before, it is sometimes called 
the striving of the Spirit. It is the Spirit showing 
to the mind of the sinner, by the instrumentality 
of the truth, his sin, his danger, his personal help¬ 
lessness, and persuading him to lay hold by faith 
of a divine Deliverer who is freely and graciously 
offered for rescue. After conversion the Spirit 
works in the believer’s soul, and yet through the 
truth, progressively in growth of grace, even 
ultimately unto complete sanctification. Before 
conversion the Spirit’s work is more objective, 
holding up the truth to view; after conversion his 
operations are subjective, working the truth which 
is embraced by faith into the very fabric of the 


104 


The Person of Christ 


soul’s moral life. The gift of the Holy Spirit in 
regenerating and sanctifying power is the be¬ 
liever’s special privilege or prerogative, and this 
gift in such a way is not bestowed upon the unre¬ 
pentant, the proud, and the self-righteous. “And 
Peter said unto them, Repent ye, and be baptized 
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ unto 
the remission of your sins, and ye shall receive the 
gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts ii. 38). 

Thus then we see the vast importance of the 
person of Christ in the soul’s renewal unto life. 
He is the manifested God, the door, the way, the 
revealer of the truth that saves. The preacher is 
his ambassador; through the Holy Spirit he is the 
revealer of the Father; dwelling in the church he 
is “ the pillar and ground of the truth ”; he is the 
“ mystery of godliness ” “ who was manifested in 
the flesh ”; and as such he is the resolution of the 
mystery of regeneration. He is the God-Christ to 
bring not only light but, what is more important, 
motive. Through him the tragedies and conflicts 
within the soul are resolved, the ancient prejudice 
conquered, the fierceness of passion tamed, and 
new desires awakened and new purposes formed. 
In a scarcely mystic sense we find in him unfolded 
the three agencies and the one instrumentality de- 


The Person of Christ and, Regeneration 105 


scribed above which ever cooperate in the spirit¬ 
ual birth. He empowers the preacher, he is the 
God shown by the Spirit, he is the truth, and he 
is the motive power to transform the life from sin 
to holiness. Luther’s vigorous metaphors appeal 
strongly to the one to whom Christ, “ in whom 
dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” 
has become a living presence and power. He says: 
“ In fine, through the word we are incorporated 
with Christ, so that all that he has is ours, and we 
can interest ourselves in him as in our own body.” 
And further: “As bodily food is transmuted into 
the nature of man, so that it loses, its own form 
and becomes flesh and blood, even so, when the 
soul lays hold of God’s word concerning Christ 
with the heart, and takes it to itself, faith does not 
remain inert, but permeates and transforms the 
man, so that he becomes incorporated with Christ 
and Christ dwells in him.” 1 

From statements such as this, and from the na¬ 
ture of the case, it follows that the relation of 
truth to life is an entirely essential and intimate 
one. The statement sometimes heard, that it mat¬ 
ters little what a man believes provided he lives 

1 See Dorner, The Person of Christ, Div. ii. vol. ii. p. 

66 . 


106 


The Person of Christ 


right, implies a gross absurdity, and the prevalent 
acceptance of it is fraught with mischief of a sub¬ 
tle and dangerous kind. It is much as if one 
should say, “ It matters not what poisons we take 
with our food, provided we keep the body well/’ 
But the essential condition of keeping the body 
well is the taking of wholesome food and avoiding 
the poisons. Those who decry the creeds often 
say, “ We shun the dogma and seek the life.” But 
what, in their view, is the “ life ” ? It is likely to 
be some shadowy phantasm of the imagination, 
which, like the world in the time of its chaos, is 
without form and void. Do we not yet know that 
the form of true life is but the fashion in which 
the truth expresses itself? and that the life cannot 
be vague when the truth in its strength and pro¬ 
portion is well incorporated in vital expression? 
When Christ said, “ I am the truth,” he meant to 
tell us that the total of truth is embodied in him in 
living form. To live right is to believe right; and 
it has been wisely observed that “ it is impossible 
to respect a man’s religion if one has no respect 
for the ideas on which it is based.” The saying 
of Carlyle has become at length trite, that “ the 
war which makes up the true history of the world 
is the war of belief against unbelief.” The decry- 


The Person of Christ and Regeneration 107 


ing of creeds in the supposititious interest of life is 
shallow in thought and harmful to the life it 
affects to promote. The forming and correcting 
of creeds are the product of life, and in turn they 
react constructively on the processes of life. Life 
must be intellectual in order to be in a broad sense 
practical. Manhood cannot be built on limp nega¬ 
tions. Theological ideas and moral conduct are 
united by a bond of God’s own making; and let 
not the art of man attempt to put them asunder. 
He takes a heavy responsibility who allows him¬ 
self to tamper with the beliefs of the people. Dr. 
Forsyth says in the London Contemporary Re¬ 
view: 

“A church of free thought would be no church 
at all, but the most sectarian of sects, the most 
scholastic of schools. There is something almost 
boyish in the aggressive use of a pulpit for a free- 
thought propaganda. . . . What is certain, if the 
history of Christianity proves anything, is that 
without the theology of an atoning cross criticism 
of Christ or laudation of him gets the better of 
worship or even reverence. . . . Subjective faith 
cannot last without objective. Faith as a frame 
of mind cannot endure without a faith in which to 
believe. The notion of faith can only live upon the 
content of faith. ... If the world’s moral need 
were ever driven to choose between a rationalized, 


108 


The Person of Christ 


sentimentalized Protestantism and Rome, it is to 
Rome it would fall, because of the objective and 
evangelical element which rationalism destroys, 
but which Romanism only perverts.” 

All of this is the same as to say that there is no 
life which is not built on the truth; and, for the 
Christian, the truth is Christ and the cross. When 
the objective ground of character and life is neg¬ 
lected, there follows the too prevalent danger of 
losing the real power of religion in forms, cere¬ 
monies, and outward activities. The forms will 
take care of themselves when Christ and his truth 
are being wrought into life. 

What then is the one thing needful? Is it any¬ 
thing other than regenerated life? the regenerated 
life grounded on a sound theology? The work of 
God in the soul is to believe on him whom he hath 
sent. Too often we assume that we have religion, 
the very life; and then, when we set ourselves 
about works that ought to appear as fruits, we 
bewilder ourselves in vast mazes of “ how-tos ” 
till our effort is reflected back upon itself, and our 
spirits become distraught, like the sparrow that 
has lost its course in beating against a blinding 
.storm. A strange thing it would be for a sturdy 
oak, having vital force in all its life courses, to be 


The Person of Christ and Regeneration 109 


asking itself how it should grow and clothe itself 
in frondage and bring forth fruit. It grows into 
forms that are after the laws of its own life, and 
into splendor according to the force in that life to 
urge it on to fine expression. We may be more 
concerned about the expressions of power than 
about the fundamental fact whether or not we 
have the power to express. We may dismiss the 
question of the distribution of the cargo until we 
settle the prior question whether it has yet been 
taken from the vessel. When Paul told the Roman 
Christians to “ put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” he 
did not add a prosy homily as to what should be 
the cut of the garment; the garment would display 
the glories belonging to itself. 

And the regenerated life has the indorsement of 
the world, and is the channel of power to subdue 
it. “ What,” exclaims the Interior, “ would be¬ 
come of the religious fads, if they had not Chris¬ 
tianity to 1 finance ’ them ? ” Surely they must 
soon pass into nothingness; nevertheless, in mul¬ 
titudes of cases, not until they have wrought much 
mischief. The “ deeper philosophy ” that finds 
nothing profound in the “ mystery of godliness ”; 
the hope larger than that promised in the gospel, 
the product of speculative reason rather than in- 


110 


The Person of Christ 


tuitive interpretation of the divine Book; the 
“ broader outlook ” that sees farther than God’s 
revelation of himself in Christ; the immanence 
that has no need of a Presence revealed by the 
Holy Spirit; the evolution that knows how to 
make worlds without a God; the “ Over-soul ” 
without a heart that melts in pity; — what are all 
these to the hard heart of the prodigal that needs 
a power to melt and subdue? to the soul over¬ 
whelmed in the billows, crying out for the Ever¬ 
lasting arms? We may talk philosophies and ex¬ 
ploit our fads, but in the end humanity’s heart 
finds its refuge where it can rest in the undis¬ 
turbed repose of a regenerated life. 


CHAPTER VII 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND 
EVANGELIZATION 

Evangelization is sufficiently defined by the 
following formula: The making of the gospel of 
Christ prevail through preaching. Here is its 
central function and energy, though the many 
other means of grace need not be overlooked; the 
praying of all true believers, the private study of 
the Word, and the various forms of witness¬ 
bearing by the lay multitudes of God’s true chil¬ 
dren. But Christianity may be differentiated from 
all other religions in this, that it can be preached. 
Christianity has erected a pulpit, through which 
reason and conscience are addressed by oral dis¬ 
course and appeal. Not so Mohammedanism, nor 
Buddhism, nor Confucianism, nor polytheism in 
any of its forms. Our Bible can be preached, but 
only because the center and culmination of its 
revelations are in the person of Christ, and in his 
offered redemption by the way of the cross. The 
preaching of the gospel and the preaching of 
Christ as he and his work lie disclosed in the Bible 
are essentially the same thing. “ But though we, 


112 


The Person of Christ 


or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you 
any gospel other than that which we preached 
unto you, let him be anathema” (Gal. i. 8). This 
gospel of Paul’s was Jesus Christ and him cruci¬ 
fied, for he determined everywhere to know no 
other. The divine Lord and a divine message 
were the burden of his proclamations. 

From this it follows that the preacher occupies 
a distinct place, and that his office is unique. It 
is the munus of the old Latins, with many subor¬ 
dinate oihcia or functions. He is not primarily an 
investigator, though his office may, and generally 
should, within certain limits, involve nice and ex¬ 
haustive investigation. He is not a lecturer, whose 
office is to convey useful information in an enter¬ 
taining manner, though the preacher may turn 
lecturer on fit occasions in doing foundation work 
for his preaching. He is not a discusser, whose 
office is to break in pieces, expose fallacies, and 
sift the truth from the chaff for better construc¬ 
tion and consolidation; though the preacher may 
in time of need make use of controversial disqui¬ 
sition. He is not a speculator — I use the word 
in a good sense — whose chief function is to start 
new leads, the working of which may bring us 
new truth or broader views of the truth we 


The Person of Christ and Evangelization 113 

already possess; though the preacher may, and 
occasionally profitably, have speculation as an 
avocation to be pursued for recreation or stimulus 
concurrently with his only proper vocation. He 
is not to be a debater, either in the pulpit or out 
of it; though he may enforce truth with argument, 
provided his argumentation is not in a controver¬ 
sial spirit, and in rare cases he may stand before 
the world in grand controversy, when the founda¬ 
tions of truth are assailed and are in danger of 
breaking up. 

The preacher is the bearer of a proclamation, 
an ambassador from a court, a herald of good 
tidings; and woe to the preacher who has no good 
tidings to proclaim. He is made the herald, not 
by the appointment of man, but by the ordinance 
of God. And not by the ordinance of God in some 
arbitrary designation. His appointment is to 
meet deep needs and to satisfy profound fitnesses 
that lie in the nature of things; even the fitnesses 
of a divine provision for the redemption of a race, 
and the establishing of a kingdom of righteous¬ 
ness and peace. Preaching, therefore, will be one 
of the desperate needs of the race till the work of 
redemption shall be complete. The church suf¬ 
fers instantaneous check in its conquests at the 


114 


The Person of Christ 


point where preaching is languid, or some sem¬ 
blance is substituted in the place of it. 

The straitness of the definition of the office of 
the preacher must indicate some surprising pecul¬ 
iarity in the matter about which he is to concern 
himself; and if the gospel is true, there is. The 
ministry of the gospel is the ministry of the 
eternal Word, the Word that became incarnate, 
suffered an atoning death, and rose for the resur¬ 
rection from our death in sin to the hopes of 
eternal life. The minister of the Word is not a 
priest with elaborate functions; for since the 
Great High Priest took upon himself all the func¬ 
tions of an eternal priesthood, becoming in his 
own person the altar, the offered victim, and the 
slayer, no true priest has ever yet set foot upon the 
earth. 

Fundamental, then, to the preaching office lies 
this truth: The essential part of Christianity is 
not contained in the doctrines which belong to it 
in common with natural religion, nor in the eth¬ 
ical precepts, which, if not actually discerned, are 
still verifiable by the light of nature. Its substance 
is a divine redemption by a divine Saviour, a pro¬ 
vision by the wisdom of God for the restoration 
of the broken connection between man and God. 


The Person of Christ and Evangelization 115 


The method of it is supernatural, and in many 
essential parts wholly incomprehensible by finite 
mind. The preacher is to declare many things 
which he cannot explain. And this is no objection 
to our gospel; for a comprehended Saviour and 
Redeemer can never satisfy the real wants of man 
as finite, sinful, and miserable, and could never 
receive worshipful allegiance. Our little lines will 
never fathom the depths of meaning contained in 
the mighty words judgment, grace, incarnation, 
atonement, justification, and eternal life. The 
very attempt to explore to the utmost these depths 
is to annul religion, and reduce it to a scheme of 
human moralities. It is thus that preaching may 
become the mere semblance of the real thing. 
“ Buddhism,” says Monier Williams, “ is no re¬ 
ligion at all, and certainly no theology; but rather 
a system of duty, morality, and benevolence,'with¬ 
out real duty, prayer, or priest.” Such is the ten¬ 
dency of all anti-theistic and anti-Christian sys¬ 
tems. It is not meant by this that Christianity 
demands faith without foundations, builded on 
visions in the air; but rather that its faith is 
grounded on facts too sublime for complete com¬ 
prehension. There is a wide difference between 
a fact and the explanation of it. 


116 


The Person of Christ 


The history of preaching may be adduced in 
proof of our contention; for all of the great 
evangelical preaching has presented Christ and 
the cross as the center and source of pulpit power. 
In Christ is not only the power of truth, but also 
its symmetry. The truths of Christianity are in a 
high sense organic, and truth stands or falls in 
sympathy with truth. Much of preaching is dis¬ 
figured by failing to recognize this fact. Pro¬ 
fessor Austin Phelps has said that “ the doctrines 
of depravity, of regeneration, and of atonement, 
form, with that of retribution, a quadrilateral of 
truths, with the collapse of any one of which the 
rest are quick to fall.” The denial that the Re¬ 
deemer has come in atonement is to deny the need 
of recovery from sin by a divine way; and the 
denial of the need of a supernatural regeneration 
carries with it the rejection of the cross and of 
the inevitableness of the sanctions. If there is no 
retribution, why have we need to be born again? 
The great preaching of the world has been char¬ 
acterized by the mighty wielding of a few of the 
central truths, those that gather about Christ and 
the cross, rather than by a wide range of truths, 
which, while important, are yet collateral. The 
preachers of the first centuries when Christianity 


The Person of Christ and Evangelization 117 

was forging its way against paganism, the scorn 
of the Jews, and the pride of Caesar; the mystics, 
who in unobtrusive faithfulness were preparing 
the common mind for the great Reformation, 
Tauler, John of Wesel, Huss, and the others; Lu¬ 
ther and the Reformers, Calvin, Zwingli, and 
Knox; Whitefield, the Wesleys, and Edwards, of 
the eighteenth century; and Nettleton, Finney, 
and Moody of the nineteenth; — the very mention 
of the names of these, representative of a mighty 
host of prophetic souls whose lips have been 
touched by coals from the altar whose fires never 
burn low — their very names suggest the truths 
by the wielding of which conscience has been 
awakened, sin abandoned, souls renewed, and 
whole communities born anew. The blight of sin; 
the atonement completely wrought on Calvary; 
the new birth from above; the danger of eternal 
loss for those who die in their sins; the free for¬ 
giveness and justification on condition of repent¬ 
ance and faith; — such are the doctrines that have 
been sounded from the housetops, and which have 
been wrought into forms of heroic life. Dr. 
Frank Hugh Foster mentions as “ the vital Core ” 
of the gospel “ the Christian view of the sinful 
world, and the doctrines of God, of regeneration 


118 


The Person of Christ 


by God, of prevenient grace, of justification by 
faith, of the divinity of Christ and of the trinity, 
of the objective atonement, and finally of sancti¬ 
fication by the Spirit and of the church as the 
sphere of sanctification. If any man believes 
those doctrines,” he says, “he is an evangelical 
Christian.” 1 And, we may add, if any one 
preaches those doctrines in the enduement of 
power sent from above, he is an evangelist; for 
the preaching of these in the power of the Spirit 
is evangelism. 

Our thought leads us to see again how entirely 
truth is essential to life, for there is no real life 
that does not embody the truth into itself. But 
when we insist that true evangelism is the wield¬ 
ing of truth in power, we must make the fur¬ 
ther distinction between truth believed and truth 
wrought. Orthodoxy may be preached as a kind 
of mental gymnastic, but it will lack persuasive 
energy and healing grace. The preacher must be 
a “ living epistle,” in which the living Christ shall 
be conveyed to heart as well as mind. We must 
be careful to see that the fire is burning when we 
attempt to expound the mystery of combustion. 
A philosophy of fire will not kindle a flame. When 
1 Christian Life and Theology, p. 275. 


The Person of Christ and Evangelization 119 


spiritual life declines, religion will take the form 
of intellectualism, which may be expected to re¬ 
sult in formalism, ecclesiasticism, and religious 
politics. But these evils cannot be escaped by the 
neglect of doctrine in the interest of so-called life. 
The German mystics had serious limitations in 
trusting in the infallibility of inspirations and 
revelations that were assumed to come to them in 
special divine manifestations; but mysticism gave 
way before Luther, who proclaimed the Scrip¬ 
tures as a standard of faith as against individual 
intuition. But the mystics had an advantage over 
the modern liberalism that proposes some vague 
conception of life as against the acceptance of 
creeds; for the mystics had the graces of intense 
moral earnestness, and the simplicity of their faith 
kept them true to Christ and the cross. A chilly 
mysticism will lose the true doctrine of Christ and 
the life also. 

I am not disturbed by the objection that the 
preaching which centers in Christ and the cross 
with the doctrines organic therewith will be nar¬ 
row in range, and intellectually unproductive. 
This cannot be so. We enlarge the intelligence in 
breadth in proportion as we reach the greatest 
truths in depth. The knowledge of the profound- 


120 


The Person of Christ 


est of the laws of the material world is simple 
when discovered, but that knowledge is wide in 
its implications and relations. Modern astronomy 
is chiefly the outworking of the heliocentric the¬ 
ory of the solar system, and a thousand facts are 
expounded by the discovery of one great principle. 
The great preachers have not been narrow men. 
Whitefield was not narrow because he could 
preach a sermon well, as he affirmed, only after 
the fortieth trial. It is by its depth that the gos¬ 
pel explains all mysteries, and its range is as wide 
as the needs of the world in all generations, and 
its beneficence comprehends the complex necessi¬ 
ties of all possible forms of human experience. 

One practical advantage of making the preach¬ 
ing of Christ the central thought in evangelism is 
of inestimable importance; namely, the moral 
superiority arising from the sublimity of a mighty 
conviction. He only holds the truth with tenacity 
who is also held by it; and it is only a great truth 
that can have permanent hold on the mind and 
conscience of man. There are no great reforms ex¬ 
cepting those that involve a moral element; and 
there are no great religious convictions but those 
that take hold of the revelations of God in Christ. 
The soul is safe in its trusting, only when it con- 


The Person of Christ and Evangelisation 121 


sciously commits itself to the veracity of God; 
here it holds and is safely held, and here are en¬ 
kindled the great moral enthusiasms and the fiery 
zeal of genuine evangelism. Such comes to those 
who have discerned their Lord, surrendered to his 
leadership, and espoused his cause for saving men. 
The martyr spirit in witnessing, serving, and, if 
need shall be, dying, has belonged pretty exclu¬ 
sively to those who have caught the meaning of 
the cross whereon God slew the sins of the world, 
and who have seen the need that every soul has 
of the healing by the way of that cross, that it 
may find pardon, life, and peace. Infidelity has 
no martyrs, and no more have the systems of 
false religions. Those who surrender their lives 
to carry the truth to the ends of the world are the 
bond-servants of a divine Lord. The motive of 
missions is found in an appreciation of the su¬ 
preme value of souls, and in their need of deliver¬ 
ance in the one only way of salvation. 

The power of great and sound conviction is 
tested by its quality of transmissibility. Has it 
within itself the energy of reproduction? Does a 
leader repeat himself in followers whose lives are 
made effective for service and wholesome for 
moral interests ? Even Socrates, the so-called 


122 


The Person of Christ 


master of spiritual births, and the originator of a 
great philosophical impulse, founded no abiding 
school, and he did not repeat himself in multi¬ 
tudes of spiritual children. But Wesley lives to¬ 
day in books, preachers, missions, churches, and 
millions of converts, who are witnessing for the 
truths he espoused and practising the virtues he 
inculcated. And what might we say of Luther 
and his Reformation? Professor Harnack, the 
great historian of Berlin, has recently in a learned 
work attempted to answer the question “ What is 
Christianity ? ” But, even in Germany, the voice of 
Luther dead is greater than the learned historian 
living. The Berlin Pastoral Conference recently 
harked back to Luther in strong resolves, in 
which, with much besides, they say: “ This con¬ 

ference with the reformers and faithful of all 
ages, who have spoken by the power of the Holy 
Spirit, testifies that Christ, the Son of God, must 
remain in indivisible association with the gospel, 
as the central point of Christianity, and subscribes 
to the confession, ' I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s 
only begotten Son, our Lord.’ ” 

The progress of Christian evangelization has 
been greatly promoted by awakenings that are 
known under the general name of revivals. With- 


The Person of Christ and Evangelization 123 


out doubt these movements in the church have 
been productive of great renewals of spiritual life 
and evangelistic power. But I pass the old de¬ 
bate concerning their value, and the question 
whether we should now place dependence upon 
them for the saving of men and the edification of 
the invisible kingdom. If Christianity shall move 
triumphantly on with even step; if there shall be 
no decadence of vital power, and no worldly in¬ 
fatuations shall paralyze its energies; if the house¬ 
holds of faith shall be ever the abodes of brotherly 
love, unrent by dissensions, untainted by jeal¬ 
ousies, and clean of worldliness and engrossing 
sin; if sinners shall be saved day by day by a true 
conviction of sin and faith in the cross, so that 
the kingdom of heaven shall suffer the violence of 
their urgency to enter therein; then indeed no re¬ 
viving will be called for and no special “ meas¬ 
ures ” need be sought. But unfortunately the 
world has not got on in that happy way. When 
we attempt to prove that even civilization is ad¬ 
vancing from the worse to the better, we must 
ever take the long view. Historical progress has 
revealed the fact of long declensions followed by 
sharp uplifts, granting that the forces of the up¬ 
lift have been gathering during the periods of de- 


124 


The Person of Christ 


dine. So also has it been with the church; and 
while the fact remains, revivals may be expected, 
and they should be welcomed. We need not de¬ 
fend their crudities and extravagances, if such 
shall appear; but, on the other hand, we must not 
be too fastidious and faultfinding when the Spir¬ 
it’s power is clearly manifest. When the temple 
is to be cleansed some very rough work is to be 
expected, and it is the deadness of Israel that has 
made the rough work necessary. What indeed is 
a revival? In substance it is nothing other than 
a special incoming of divine power along the line 
of Christ's redemptive work; and we should be 
solicitous that the power shall descend, rather 
than critical as to the method of its manifestation. 

Granting, therefore, that, with human nature 
as it is, revivals are to be expected and sought, 
it is of the greatest importance that they be gen¬ 
uine, and that their courses shall be guided by a 
“ wisdom that is profitable to direct.” Their forms 
will vary in a large measure according to views 
that are prevalent as to the nature and work of 
Christ. His deity may be emphasized on the one 
hand, or his humanity on the other; he may be 
regarded as a divine Redeemer, or, on the other 
hand, as the greatest ethical teacher. According 


The Person of Christ and Evangelization 125 

to such varying views the forms of evangelization 
will vary. There has been much insistence that 
the next great revival be one in which the duty 
and need of personal righteousness shall receive 
especial emphasis. This is well. But we must 
still remember that religion is the sure basis of 
sound morality, and true righteousness has never 
prevailed in the world in independence of the mo¬ 
tives brought to bear by true religion. Christ was 
the greatest ethical teacher, but he would not 
have been that, if he had not also been Redeemer. 
Sinners may be arrested by exhibiting the terrific 
consequences of violated law, but it still remains 
true that “ conviction at Calvary is of a higher 
type than conviction at Sinai.” Tears shed at the 
foot of the cross of expiation and pardon are more 
effective than the fears awakened by “ the thun- 
derings, and lightnings, and the voice of the 
trumpet, and the mountain smoking.” The peren¬ 
nial Christ is the perennial motive for the saving 
of men, old as Christianity is old; and if there be a 
new evangelism, it must mean nothing more than 
some new and better way to bring sinners to the 
foot of the cross. A “ new evangelism ” that 
struggles to make a saving religion out of some 
modifications of naturalism presented under the 


126 


The Person of Christ 


forms of a Christian terminology, but out of 
which the most essential of the Christian ideas 
have been eliminated, is illusory and vain. Such 
an evangelism may “ vault into an aerial minis¬ 
try,” but it will never be the exalted power that 
can reach the masses of men, and lead them up 
to the heights of personal redemption. 

It should be added that the true ministry of 
Christian evangelism is our sole safeguard against 
the frittering away of the influence of the church 
through various forms of worldly conformity. 
The passion for bringing men to Christ has ex¬ 
pulsive power against all forms of sensual solici¬ 
tation. Much of our seeming enlargement is but 
the gathering together of the elements of weak¬ 
ness. The organ sounds, and the entertainment 
proceeds; but souls may be still in Satan’s toils. 
Well-dressed vassalage may throng the courts of 
God. Then we are tempted to begin the inven¬ 
tions of religions, and to reconstruct Christianity 
for the need of the times. But Christianity is 
from eternity and unto eternity, and the fluctua¬ 
tions of the times affect it little. A ministry for 
the times there may be; but no gospel for a par¬ 
ticular time, any more than there can be a new 
gospel of Matthew and of Mark and of Luke and 


The Person of Christ and Evangelization 127 


of John. The true preacher discerns his time in 
the light and ministry of the Word; here is the 
light from the truth eternal, and the eternal he 
finds in the record of the Revelation of God. He 
commits his spirit to the timeless Word, the 
Christ of God, and he becomes a power by the 
Spirit’s brooding, revealing, and disclosing. Be¬ 
fore him the world itself is changed. Old things 
of transgression pass away, and all things in his 
presence form anew. He beholds Satan as light¬ 
ning fall from heaven. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND THE 
KINGDOM 

It is suggestive that Matthew and Mark in 
their records of the “gospel of Jesus Christ, the 
Son of God,” when there were so many seemingly 
more important matters left unrecorded, should 
have tarried to tell us how the great Forerunner, 
John the Baptist, was clothed, and what was his 
daily diet: “And John was clothed with camel’s 
hair, and had a leathern girdle about his loins, and 
did eat locusts and wild honey” (Mark i. 6). But 
we begin to find a reason for this when we note 
the scope of the Baptist’s preaching; for its bur¬ 
den was, “ Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven 
is at hand” (Matt. iii. 2). Jesus also made much 
of this reason given by John for repentance. When 
he sent forth the apostles he told them to announce 
the nearness of the kingdom of heaven: “And as 
ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is 
at hand” (Matt. x. 7). This phrase and the cor¬ 
responding one, “ the kingdom of God,” are heard 
so often in the life and teaching of Christ, that we 
cannot doubt that they represent something en- 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 129 


tirely fundamental among the facts of the gospel 
he came to the world to proclaim. He announced 
the kingdom, not only as important, but also as 
something new and distinctive, the time for the 
preparation for it having passed. That which had 
gone before was anticipatory and preparative; now 
the time had come for full realization. But what 
has this to do with the dress and food of John the 
Baptist? Very much. This kingdom was to be 
redemptive, and the passage from the old to the 
new involved a reconstruction of character. John 
came to preach repentance, as the fundamental 
work which was to entitle a man to citizenship in 
the new kingdom, and in dress and manner of life 
he personified, bodied forth, his message. The 
sackcloth, made of camel’s hair, was the garb of 
mourners; the girdle of untanned leather was the 
cincture of rude Elijah the Tishbite; and the lo¬ 
custs were the food, not of luxury, but of fasting. 
Mordecai, after the king’s decree for the destruc¬ 
tion of the people, “ put on sackcloth with ashes ”; 
but when God turned David’s mourning into 
dancing, his song took up the strain, “ Thou hast 
loosed my sackcloth, and girded me with glad¬ 
ness.” An Eastern king in the olden time would 
give his queen the revenues of a city or a province 


130 


The Person of Christ 


for a girdle, the most highly-wrought and costly 
of a queen’s attire; as we might say, for pin- 
money. But John was not thus arrayed. He was 
the great mourner for the sins of the people, and 
the signs of his sorrow were in the garb he wore 
and in the food he ate. The picture of him would 
be absolute caricature, had he not been the fore¬ 
runner to proclaim a redemptive scheme. 

And we do not reach the real thought till we 
consider the motive urged for repentance; namely, 
the imminence of a new world order, called the 
kingdom of heaven. John might have urged his 
hearers to put away sin because goodness is more 
honorable than badness; or because God requires 
the forsaking of sin and the practice of righteous¬ 
ness; or because sin involves danger, while right¬ 
eousness is always safe. He did speak with great 
plainness to the Pharisees, and he urged them to 
flee from the wrath to come; told them that a sift¬ 
ing process had begun by which the wheat should 
be separated from the chaff, and the chaff burned 
in unquenchable fire. But, after all, the great rea¬ 
son urged was the duty of turning and setting 
themselves right towards the new kingdom. The 
old order involved peril and ultimate loss, and it 
was to pass; the new was righteousness and ulti- 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 131 


mate peace. The old kingdom was of this world 
with its sin, finiteness, and ultimate shame; the 
new was righteousness, peace, and ultimate tri¬ 
umph. “ The things which are seen are temporal; 
but the things which are not seen are eternal ” 
(2 Cor. iv. 18) ; “ For the kingdom of God is not 
eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace 
and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. xiv. 17). 

If it is of so vast importance to turn from the 
old to the new, to break allegiance to the prince of 
this world, and to enroll in a new citizenship said 
to be of heaven, it is also important to inquire 
what that new kingdom is in constitution and 
scope; and, furthermore also, who is the Head of 
it, and what he is that he requires the allegiance of 
all souls to him as King. The Scriptures have not 
left us in the dark concerning this inquiry. The 
new kingdom with Christ as its head is the new 
creation, as distinct as the first with Adam as its 
head, but more glorious, as the second Adam is 
more than the first. The creation of the old was 
celebrated on the seventh day; the new creation 
we celebrate on the first; and that too appropri¬ 
ately, for the introduction of the new redemptive 
order through the incarnation and the atoning 
cross is a greater work than the making of phys- 


132 


The Person of Christ 


ical worlds. But we may pass to note the special 
marks of the new kingdom. 

1. The first point of significance is clearly that 
of source. The new kingdom is from above. The 
characterizing words “ of heaven ” and “ of God ” 
mean the same thing, and tell us that the sources 
of its constitution, its authority, and its plan of ad¬ 
ministration are from the throne of God himself. 
Its sphere, certainly in its beginnings, and in so far 
as human beings are concerned, is in this world; 
but it did not originate here, neither are its laws 
naturalistic nor subject to human modification or 
abrogation. When the Pharisees asked Jesus 
when the kingdom of God should come, he replied, 
“ The kingdom of God is in the midst of you ” 
(Luke xvii. 21). And before Pilate in the Pre- 
torium he said, “ My kingdom is not of this world; 
if my kingdom were of this world, then would my 
servants fight” (John xviii. 36). It was in the 
midst of the world, but not of it. It is a kingdom 
within kingdoms, whose laws are supreme above 
all others; and human laws that contravene the 
laws of the kingdom are null and void from the 
nature of the case. This is the true “ higher law ” 
doctrine. 

It is evident that a kingdom of such origin, con- 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 133 

stitution, and administration cannot be the product 
of evolution as commonly conceived. This word 
“ evolution ” is used in so many different senses 
that it is not easy to be absolutely certain what any 
particular writer may mean by it. But, if we shall 
define it as the naturalistic unfolding of forces 
without increments, it is obvious that the kingdom 
did not come, and is not progressing, in that way. 
Christianity and the church kingdom have lived 
and conquered in the world by the constant coming 
in of God in supernatural power and guidance. 
Christianity was once in a tomb, with a stone at 
the door, sealed, and guarded by Roman soldiery. 
But “ an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, 
and came and rolled away the stone, and sat upon 
it” (Matt, xxviii. 2). The description is too mi¬ 
nute and personal to admit of any fair naturalistic 
exposition. The earthquake might roll away the 
stone, but that would leave the celestial visitor and 
the marvelous emergence from the tomb still un¬ 
accounted for. Let us not be stumbled, for here 
we have only a typical fact. The church has ever 
been saved by the supernatural rolling away of 
stones, and emergences from tombs where the Lord 
has been crucified afresh. By common providences 
or by the gifts of the Holy Spirit or by a mighty 


134 


The Person of Christ 


hand, God has constantly come to renew, to save, 
to guide, and to bless. We may not object to the 
definition of evolution proposed by the late D. W. 
Simon; namely, “ a ceaseless differentiation and 
transmutation of energy .... under the control of 
an incalculably complex, informing, progressive 
idea ”; for an idea controls only when the con¬ 
troller, the thinker and the thinker’s will, is back 
of it. As an abstraction an idea controls nothing. 
And this is in harmony with Flint, who says, “ No 
theory of evolution is workable without God in it.” 
The progress of the kingdom is better conceived 
as a growth, a progressive unfolding under the 
superintendence and promotion of God. His word 
will accomplish that which he pleases, and prosper 
in the thing whereto he has sent it (Isa. Iv. 11). 
The kingdom is built up amid and out of the re¬ 
sources of the world, but the final cause, the di¬ 
recting and energizing force, and the assured hope 
of ultimate completion are from God himself. 

2. This kingdom rests on a basis of redemption 
by the cross of Christ. Without such a basis even 
the garb of John the Baptist is without significance 
or explanation. The new song which John heard 
was a celebration of redemption: “Worthy art 
thou to take the book, and to open the seals 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 135 

thereof; for thou wast slain, and didst purchase 
unto God with thy blood men of every tribe, and 
tongue, and people, and nation, and madest them to 
be unto our God a kingdom and priests; and they 
reign upon the earth” (Rev. v. 9, 10). Had there 
been no redemption, there would have been no 
kingdom in the New Testament sense. Here then 
we meet the distinction between the government of 
God and the kingdom of heaven, or of God. The 
government of God is universal in the twofold 
sense, in that it extends to all moral beings and 
also to all moral acts. But the kingdom of God 
in the New Testament meaning includes those 
only who have been saved by the way of the 
cross of Christ. The condition of citizenship 
therein is what John the Baptist preached: “ Re¬ 
pentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord 
Jesus Christ.” The kingdom is above nature, and 
admission to it means supernatural regeneration. 
Except a man “ be born from above, he cannot see 
the kingdom of God” (John iii. 3). 

3. The law of the kingdom is the law of abso¬ 
lute righteousness, and being such it concerns the 
very thoughts and intents of the heart (Heb. iv. 
12). In this it differs from the kingdom of this 
world. The administration of human law takes 


136 


The Person of Christ 


cognizance chiefly of acts, things done; it pre¬ 
scribes what men may and may not do. In the king¬ 
dom of heaven the subject is told what he may and 
may not think. “ Casting down imaginations,” said 
Paul, “ and every high thing that is exalted against 
the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought 
into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 
x. 5). The words of Christ himself are very ex¬ 
plicit : “ The good man out of his good treasure 
bringeth forth good things: and the evil man out 
of his evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. And 
I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall 
speak, they shall give account thereof in the day 
of judgment” (Matt. xii. 35 , 36 ). These words 
were spoken to the Pharisees in discourse concern¬ 
ing the “ abundance of the heart.” Here however 
is no infringement of the right to freedom, for 
freedom in any proper sense implies obedience to 
the truth. The so-called freedom of a mind filled 
with sophistries is sheer license. A sophisticated 
mind has not yet learned the true happiness of 
royal freedom of thought. 

4. From the foregoing point it follows that the 
kingdom is spiritual; that is, its special sphere is 
the spirits of men and angels. On earth it is men; 
in heaven it is glorified saints and the heavenly 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 137 

hosts. The head of the kingdom proclaims him¬ 
self as the Monarch of Souls, a very stupendous 
claim. And, since the kingdom is spiritual, it is com¬ 
mon to speak of it as invisible. The real kingdom 
is not conterminous with the visible manifestations 
of it in the world; for its subjects are united to 
the Head by an invisible, not a ceremonial, bond. 
If the kingdom and its organic manifestation in 
the world were conterminous, then we should have 
an infallible church, all members of which should 
be saved persons, and the head would proclaim an 
infallible law. Such, indeed, is the thought in 
Romanism. But doubtless many are organically 
in the kingdom who are spiritually without. Such 
evidently were Judas Iscariot and Simon the Sor¬ 
cerer. “ By the Roman theory a horde of savages 
is brought to Christ by the sacraments; by the 
Protestant theory sinners are brought to the sacra¬ 
ments by conversion to Christ in faith and peni¬ 
tence. Make the visible and the invisible church 
one and identical, and you make therein baptism 
and regeneration identical.” 1 

5. We have yet to add concerning the kingdom, 
that it is progressive and eternal. Its progressive 
nature is indicated by the representations of Scrip- 
*Dr. A. H. Ross, The Church Kingdom, p. 50. 


138 


The Person of Christ 


ture, which exhibit it now as present and yet as 
future. It is at hand, but it belongs to eternity; 
it is in the midst of the world, but its scope em¬ 
braces the heaven of heavens. The parable of the 
leaven represents its nature as intensive; the par¬ 
able of the mustard seed its nature as extensive. 
The disciples should in no wise taste death till they 
should see the kingdom of God; but, on the other 
hand, they that continued with Christ in his temp¬ 
tations were to inherit a kingdom appointed to 
them, were to eat and drink at his table in his king¬ 
dom, and were to “ sit on thrones judging the 
twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke xxii. 29, 30). The 
geography of this world and our measurements of 
time in no way define the limits of Christ’s benefi¬ 
cent reign. And in its progressiveness it is to be¬ 
come ultimately all-embracing. “And the seventh 
angel sounded; and there followed great voices in 
heaven, and they said, 

The kingdom of the world is become the king¬ 
dom of the our Lord, and of his Christ: and he 
shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. xi. 15). 

And yet, when the mediatorial work of Christ shall 
be completed and the kingdom firmly established, 
how much, and what, in particular will it include? 
Clearly it will not include within itself the incor- 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 139 

rigibly wicked, whoever they may be; for it will be 
a kingdom of absolute righteousness, and wicked¬ 
ness from the nature of the case must be outside. 
The present mixed conditions will at some time 
end, and there will be a separation that will be 
final and complete. A kingdom that is at once 
righteous and universal in the sense of including 
wicked spirits is absurd. “ Without are the dogs, 
and the sorcerers, and the fornicators, and the 
murderers, and the idolaters, and every one that 
loveth and maketh a lie” (Rev. xxii. 15). The 
within and without principle is too firmly laid in 
nature, and rooted in Scripture, for undoing by our 
speculations and sympathies. 

But we still press the inquiry, How much will the 
kingdom include? Paul in the great resurrection 
chapter in his first letter to the Corinthians speaks 
of the completion of Christ’s mediatorial work, “ the 
end, when he shall deliver up the kingdom of God, 
even the Father; when he shall have abolished all 
rule and all authority and power. For he must 
reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. 
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death ” 
(1 Cor. xv. 24-27). Will the natural world itself 
be delivered from its bondage? Says Paul again: 
“ For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of 


140 


The Person of Christ 


its own will, but by reason of him who subjected 
it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be de¬ 
livered from the bondage of corruption into the 
liberty of the glory of the children of God ” 
(Rom. viii. 20, 21). We seem thus to be permit¬ 
ted to hope that the very ground, which suffered 
in the primeval curse because of sin, is to share 
in the redemptive deliverance. “ Cursed is the 
ground for thy sake ” was the awful announce¬ 
ment to the first transgressor; and with thorns, 
and thistles, and beasts of venom and prey its sur¬ 
face has been covered and overrun for the warn¬ 
ing and discipline of man in his transgressions. 
As Dr. Bushnell has portrayed with eloquence and 
power in his volume on “ The Moral Uses of 
Dark Things,” and again in his chapter on “An- 
ticipative Consequences ” of sin in his “ Nature 
and the Supernatural,” we do not find the real de¬ 
sign, the final cause, of anything in the world till 
we see it disclosed in the plans, facts, and forces 
of the redemptive kingdom. The final cause of 
any particular thing is the sum of all the uses, 
near and remote, to which it may ever be put; and 
we do not reach the goal of uses till we compre¬ 
hend the great plans of God which embrace the 
ages of ages. The world was unparadised be- 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 141 

cause man fell from his moral integrity; the world 
was made for man, and made as it was because of 
the foreseen appalling fact that man would bring 
in a reign of sin. The anticipated sin of the crea¬ 
ture predetermined the nature of the creation; it 
was fitted in advance for the wickedness of its in¬ 
habitant. May we hope that the paradise will be 
restored when redemption is completed? Says Dr. 
Bushnell: 

“ This whole tossing, rending, recomposing pro¬ 
cess, that we call geology, symbolizes evidently, as 
in highest reason it should, the grand spiritual 
catastrophe, and Christian new-creation of man; 
which, both together, comprehend the problem of 
mind, and so the final causes or last ends of all 
God's works. What we see is the beginning con¬ 
versing with the end, and Eternal Forethought 
reaching across the tottering mountains and boil¬ 
ing seas, to unite beginning and end together. So 
that we may hear the grinding layers of rocks sing¬ 
ing harshly— 

‘ Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree ’ 

and all the long eras of desolation, and refitted 
bloom and beauty, represented in the registers of 
the world, are but the epic in stone of man's great 
history before the time." 1 

1 Nature and the Supernatural, p. 206. 


142 


The Person of Christ 


But, further, the completed mediatorial kingdom 
will not only be very comprehensive, gathering 
into itself the ultimates of all the great world pur¬ 
poses and movements, but it will continue without 
end. “And he shall reign over the house of Jacob 
forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no 
end ” (Luke i. 33). The passage in First Corin¬ 
thians which says of Christ, “ he shall deliver up 
the kingdom to God, even the Father” (xv. 24), 
is simply the announcement that his mediatorial 
work will be completed and triumphant, and that 
his commission, so to speak, is returned to him 
who gave it. But with the completion of the 
mediatorial work and reign, the eternal head¬ 
ship and reign will then begin. To all the re¬ 
deemed the God-man will ever be the door and the 
way to God the Father. Says Dr. Behrends truly, 
“ The vision of his face is the only vision I ever 
expect to have of God, as Philip saw in him the 
Father.” The incarnate God will never become 
unincarnate, but throughout the ages will be the 
revelation of the Father and the blessed Presence. 

What, now, must he be who is the head of this 
kingdom, and who is to abide such forever? That 
Christ is the head the Scriptures amply declare: 
“ And his servants shall serve him; and they shall 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 143 

see his face; and his name shall be on their fore¬ 
heads ” (Rev. xxii. 3, 4). Such is Christ to be 
after his redemptive work is done, “ and when 
there shall be no curse any more.” 

It is of first importance to note that no mere 
man, however great and however free from sin, 
could possibly create, give law to, and administer 
the affairs of such a kingdom. The highest finite 
wisdom would be wholly inadequate; the loftiest 
human genius would topple before its ever-recur¬ 
ring problems. But, further, a human headship to 
such a kingdom could never secure the confidence 
of the subjects of it. Any participation of finite 
beings in the administration of the kingdom of 
heaven would instantly detract from the confidence 
its members are expected to repose in it. Here is 
a dominion, wide as the world, enduring as eter¬ 
nity, embracing all moral creatures and all moral 
acts, claiming in its scope to reach the very 
thoughts and intents of hearts, also to have as its 
head one who embraces in himself all the func¬ 
tions of government, legislative, judicial, and ad¬ 
ministrative, — can the head of such dominion be 
other than divine? Who in the infinite spaces of 
being can successfully establish the claim to be in 
very deed the Monarch of Souls? He must be 


144 


The Person of Christ 


the Being from whom all other being by creation 
is derived. 

With this great question before us, three sup¬ 
positions are possible. 

1. We may deny that any such thing as the 
kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God, either 
now exists or ever will exist; that any divine 
constitution out of the heavens, spiritual, authori¬ 
tative, and to be endless, has been fashioned or 
contemplated. We may view the world as the 
product of naturalistic evolutionary forces, carry¬ 
ing us on we know not whither or to what, in 
some “ ever flowing becoming,” as Heraclitus put 
it, without idea, plan, or final cause, and, hence, 
without a moral Head or moral administration. 
This of course is a conception wholly unscriptural; 
and, moreover, it implies a barefaced naturalism 
which, at the present day, let us hope, there are 
but few so bold as to rise up and defend. When 
the great, longing, plebeian heart of the world looks 
up, it surely beholds an eye, and not a socket; and 
in answer to the throbbings of its hungry spirit it 
finds the response of a Father’s love, and rests in 
the sweet assurance of a well-grounded hope. 
The conviction of Godhood, of the divine rule, and 
of the existence of a moral order whose authority 


The Person of Christ and the Kingdom 145 

shall not end, is fastened on the minds of thinking 
men too firmly to be readily shaken off. 

2. Or, second, we may suppose that there is a 
real kingdom such as the Bible reveals, but that 
the Father, and not the Christ, is the head of it. 
But here again we are met with the fact that the 
very Revelation which announces the kingdom, 
and informs us concerning its characteristics, pro¬ 
claims in unmistakable terms the headship of 
Christ. If there is a kingdom of heaven of which 
Christ is not the head, the Bible does not reveal 
it. It is fundamentally a Christ kingdom. 

“ But of the Son he saith. 

Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever; 

And the sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre 
of thy kingdom. 

Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated in¬ 
iquity : 

Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee 

With the oil of gladness above thy fellows. 

And, 

Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the 
foundation of the earth, 

And the heavens are the works of thy hands: 

They shall perish; but thou continuest: 

And they shall wax old as doth a garment; 

And as a mantle shalt thou roll them up. 

As a garment, and they shall be changed: 


146 


The Person of Christ 


But thou art the same, 

And thy years shall not fail.” 

Hebrews i. 8-12. 

In sound logic, it would seem to be as easy to deny 
the existence of the kingdom, as to deny the abso¬ 
lute supremacy of Christ in it. 

3. The third supposition is that there is a king¬ 
dom, and that Christ is the king as he declared to 
Pilate. And from all of this it follows that Christ 
is God. He, the God-man, wields the attributes 
and the authority of the throne of God. And 
through his humanity, and by no other conceiva¬ 
ble channel, these attributes and that authority are 
mediated for us unto redemption, salvation, and 
life. His authority is intrinsic and underived; it 
is inherent and inalienable; it is universal and 
eternal; and it is absolute and final. From that 
authority there is no appeal, for it is the authority 
of God. Humanitarianism is logically, historically, 
and philosophically absurd. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND 
RETRIBUTION 

The settlement of the controversies concerning 
the nature and extent of retribution turns chiefly 
on the answers we shall give to two prime ques¬ 
tions: (1) Has any one spoken on the subject 
with absolute authority? and (2) do we know pre¬ 
cisely what has been said? Here emerges again 
the old inquiry concerning the person of Christ. 
Here is our initial point in investigation, as in so 
many subjects beside, for the nature and extent of 
retribution is primarily to be determined by reve¬ 
lation rather than by a priori reasoning. The rev¬ 
elation comes first, and the reasoning follows to 
confirm and assure the mind in regard to the wis¬ 
dom and the ways of God. We have come a long 
way, therefore, if we shall have found that Christ 
was a person of such a nature that he could speak 
with authority. If he did so speak, then we may 
confine our scrutiny to the determination of what 
exactly he said. As a matter of fact, I suppose 
that those who hold unbiblical views concerning 
retribution, if they should fathom the secrets of 


148 


The Person of Christ 


their own consciousness, would discover a lurking 
skepticism concerning the divine nature of Christ, 
and hence a doubt whether he had a right to claim 
the prerogative of speaking with authority. 

To speak with authority is to utter truths from 
the acceptance of which there can be no appeal, 
and the announcement of which must be accepted 
by all parties as absolutely final. This is what we 
call absolute authority. There is an authority which 
has weight and which we may call relative. Men 
of great scientific attainment in certain special 
lines we call authorities in their specialties, but 
theirs is not absolute authority. We are at 
liberty to question their deliverances, and to test 
the truthfulness of their statements by subject¬ 
ing them to further scrutiny and investigation. 
There are those who deny the existence of au¬ 
thority that is absolute and final; and they are 
right, if there is no personal God, and if God 
has made no revelation of himself to men. Only 
the Word of God can absolutely bind the con¬ 
science, and claim the allegiance of all intelli¬ 
gences. I purposely omit the consideration of the 
a priori affirmations of reason, for they make no 
definite and final announcements on such a subject 
as retribution. 


The Person of Christ and Retribution 149 

The authority of conscience is absolute in its affir¬ 
mations concerning fundamental right and wrong, 
but it is not a guide in the multitudinous matters 
of practical duty. The great question, then, for us 
to decide is, Did Jesus Christ when he was in the 
world in bodily presence, when he gathered about 
himself a specially selected company of learners, 
speak with authority ? and did he claim so to 
speak? Clearly he could not so claim unless his 
word was in truth the very word of God. It is 
human to err, and the wisest and best of men, even 
in the matters in which their knowledge may fairly 
be called expert, will sometimes make mistakes. 
No search into the nooks and crannies of a subject, 
and no intellectual honesty, can endow a finite 
mind with anything more than a relative author¬ 
ity. Our scientific truths, so-called, are merely a 
body of beliefs whose certainty is established to a 
very high degree of probability. They are not in¬ 
tuitively true, nor are they mathematically demon¬ 
strated. But he to whom all authority had been 
given in heaven and on earth (Matt, xxviii. 18) 
needed instruction from no one, and his teachings 
have need of neither modification nor correction. 
In him is not yea and nay, but the final verity. 
Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians says, 


150 


The Person of Christ 


“ For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was 
preached among you by us, even by me and Sil- 
vanus and Timothy, was not yea and nay, but in 
him is yea. For how many soever be the prom¬ 
ises of God, in him is the yea: wherefore also 
through him is the Amen, unto the glory of God 
through us” (2 Cor. i. 19, 20). 

In matters religious, then, we have a final and 
absolute authority, and this is nothing other than 
the very person of Christ himself. He is not 
merely the spokesman for God; as himself both God 
and man, his word has the authority of Deity: it 
is the Word of God. But how is that authority 
to be mediated to us? Is it through the Chris¬ 
tian consciousness? So some say. But this would 
leave us in vast uncertainty on many points. Both 
the individual and the general consciousness has 
many elements of uncertainty in it, and is in need 
of constant correcting and interpreting. The so- 
called inspirations of even good people are not usu¬ 
ally well understood even by themselves, and they 
can never be accepted as constituting a rule of 
faith and a light for practice. Much is properly 
made of the witnessing of the Holy Spirit within 
the soul of the believer (testimonium Spiritus 
Sancti internum), and the fact of a spiritual dis- 


The Person of Christ and Retribution 151 


cernment is a very real and important one. “ He 
that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself 
is judged of no man” (1 Cor. ii. 15). But in re¬ 
gard to the spiritual mind we may easily fall into 
error. The Holy Spirit does not descend upon us 
in a physical energy, as the lightning smites the 
oak, or even as the rains descend upon the earth. 
He comes by the way of the living or the written 
Word, and by no other conceivable channel. The 
soundness of our spirituality itself must be con¬ 
stantly tested by bringing our experiences to the 
touchstone of what is written. And we are no 
nearer the correct solution of the matter, when we 
say that the authority of Christ is mediated to us 
through the church. Its deliverances are not in- 
errant unless we also accept the dogma of the 
perpetuity of the apostolate, held by Protestants 
at least to be a dangerous error. We separate from 
Rome on three fundamental points: (1) the per¬ 
petuity of the apostolate; (2) the priesthood of 
Christian ministers; and (3) the dogma that the 
sacraments are the sole and efficient channels of 
grace. Protestantism firmly rejects these as errors 
leading to fatal results in practice. Nevertheless, 
the church as “ the body of Christ ” is a medium of 
authority; but not through some consecrated order. 


152 


The Person of Christ 


It may speak with authority only in so far as it 
embodies in its life the very Christ and his Word, 
revealed in matchless enduement by the revelations 
of the Holy Spirit. A church without a Bible 
made alive in its members has no more authority 
than a debating society. 

Here, then, we reach what is fundamental. We 
have Christ, the living Word, and the Book, re¬ 
cording what he said and what he fully accepted 
and indorsed. The two are united by a bond of 
God’s own making. If we have no written Book, 
we have no Christ; for it is through the Book that 
the knowledge of him and his work comes to us. 
A church without a Bible is adrift on a sea of un¬ 
certainty, with no authoritative word on which 
faith may lay hold. Without the Gospels as an 
authoritative record, even skepticism itself is with¬ 
out function; for belief and unbelief alike must go 
to the one source of knowledge as to what Chris¬ 
tianity claims to be. But in most unequivocal terms 
Christ indorsed the Written Book as trustworthy. 
“ Blessed are they that hear the word of God, and 
keep it” (Luke xi. 28), he said, and this by no 
fair construction could mean to criticize the Word 
of God and disintegrate it. “And beginning from 
Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted 


The Person of Christ and Retribution 153 

to them in all the scriptures the things concerning 
himself” (Luke xxiv. 27). 

We have, then, Christ the absolute authority; we 
have also the Word which he spoke, and the Bible, 
which he fully indorsed. What he said in regard 
to retribution is final. Do we know what he said? 
In a sermon on retribution, a young Unitarian 
clergyman is reported to have said: “ There can 

be no doubt that Jesus did actually teach the end¬ 
lessness of future punishment. But we must re¬ 
member that he was a young man. He died when 
but a little more than thirty years of age. Had he 
lived to complete his system, he doubtless would 
have approached the high theological attainments 
of the present century.” Now, what we are to 
think of such a statement will depend on our view 
of the person of Christ. To a Unitarian, who be¬ 
lieves that Jesus was a good man with a special 
genius for religion, and nothing more, there should 
be nothing offensive nor improper in it. But to the 
orthodox believer, to whom Christ is the Son of 
God in a unique sense, to whom he is the revela¬ 
tion of God because he is divine, these quoted 
words convey an impression bordering on blas¬ 
phemy. But let us not condemn our liberal friend 
too hastily. In the light of sound reason, which is 


154 


The Person of Christ 


the easier of belief, that the known words of Christ 
do not convey the thought of the endlessness of 
retribution for some, or that he was actually mis¬ 
taken in what he said? As a matter of fact, the 
second of these alternative propositions is the 
easier of credence; and it would seem to be an 
intellectual necessity that a doctrinal Universalist, 
if he shall be logical, should also be a Unitarian 
in theological position. 

For what did Christ say on this subject of retri¬ 
bution? Too many things to be quoted in detail, 
and the sayings are so familiar that extended cita¬ 
tion is needless. His words must have their 
natural meaning, for he spoke for plain people to 
whom a violent interpretation of words would not 
occur, nor would such interpretation be admit¬ 
ted. In Matthew xxv. 41 and 46 we have these 
words: “ Depart from me, ye cursed, into the 

eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his 
angels ”; “And these shall go away into eternal 
punishment; but the righteous into eternal life.” 
The word “ eternal ” characterizes the punishment 
of the wicked and the blessedness of the righteous, 
and must have the same time significance in each, 
unless there is something in the nature of the sub¬ 
jects to make such significance impossible. Again, 


The Person of Christ and Retribution 155 


“And if thy hand cause thee to stumble, cut it off: 
it is good for thee to enter into life maimed, 
rather than having thy two hands to go into hell, 
into the unquenchable fire. . . . And if thine eye 
cause thee to stumble, cast it out: it is good for 
thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one 
eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into 
hell: where their worm dieth not, and the fire is 
not quenched” (Mark ix. 43-48); “He that be- 
lieveth on the Son hath eternal life; but he that 
obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath 
of God abideth on him” (John iii. 36). The in¬ 
terpretations which make the unquenchable fire 
and the abiding wrath purifying agencies to fit 
for heaven are so violently against the natural 
meaning of the texts as to have no great number 
of serious advocates. The words convey the mean¬ 
ing of heavy disaster and finality. It is easier to 
believe that Christ was mistaken than to inject 
other meaning into his words. And if he was mis¬ 
taken, whither shall we look for an authoritative 
utterance ? 

It is generally admitted that Christ taught the 
certainty of punishment in the next world; but 
with equal clearness he taught that such punish¬ 
ment is terminable neither by reformation nor 


156 


The Person of Christ 


annihilation. I am aware that this latter point is 
disputed; but if we shall take Christ’s words as 
final, and limit our thought to the simple exposi¬ 
tion of what he said, there would seem to be little 
room for debate on the subject. As a general fact, 
those who oppose the doctrine of the endlessness 
of punishment in the future world do not derive 
their arguments from the words of Christ. They 
rather endeavor to break the force of those words 
by a priori or rational considerations. Such com¬ 
monly hold the authority of the Bible in a loose 
and negative way. To assume that a doctrine 
seemingly repugnant to human reason and repel- 
lant to human feeling must be untrue, is unsafe 
when we wish to find a true principle of inter¬ 
pretation. Human feeling is a fickle guide, and 
human reason is finite and liable to err. It is a 
significant fact that the vast majority of those who 
have accepted the words of Christ as authoritative 
and final, in spite of all subtleties and twisting of 
language, have believed that he did actually teach 
the endlessness of future retribution. Professor 
Tyler, the Nestor of his day in the Greek depart¬ 
ment of Amherst College, after exhaustive study 
and exposition, held that, if the words of Scrip¬ 
ture do not express the idea of endless retribution, 


_ The Person of Christ and Retribution 157 

then the Greek language is wholly inadequate to 
the expression of that idea. 

When we admit that the doctrine of endless 
retribution is one of revelation, and that we could 
say on a priori grounds that such retribution is a 
necessity of the divine government, we must still 
be on our guard against the fallacious conclusion 
that the doctrine is against reason. Reason could 
not say in advance that the penalties of Christ’s 
announcement are needed and inevitable; but when 
such announcement has come to us in unequivocal 
terms, we are able to see that reason is neither con¬ 
tradicted nor outraged. As already pointed out, 
there is a clear distinction between sin and guilt, 
and much confusion has arisen from failure to 
keep this distinction clear in our reasonings about 
sin and penalty. Guilt attaches to the soul that has 
sinned, and is as permanent as the being of the 
soul itself, the ill-desert being as great after pun¬ 
ishment as before its infliction. Pardon, that sets 
aside the penalty, is ever a matter of grace, not 
of desert. There is, therefore, a ground in reason 
for the infliction of endless punishment, if it shall 
be needed; and as to the need we are limited to 
the words of Christ himself. If we may not trust 
what he said, we are chiefly in the dark even till 


158 


The Person of Christ 


now. But if Christ is God, both reason and con¬ 
science are in bonds to his word. None other than 
God can bind either. We are free only as his truth 
shall make us free. 

Probably the revolt from the doctrine of the 
endlessness of retribution is at bottom a recoil from 
the wrath principle, which is believed to be con¬ 
trary to reason and to the spirit of the word of one 
who came to bring to the world a divine message 
of love. But love has its terrors, and these the sin 
of the world can invoke. There is a very deep 
significance in the phrase “ the wrath of the 
Lamb.” From that wrath the princes of this 
world may implore the rocks and mountains, fall¬ 
ing on them, to hide them. Says Dr. Bushnell: 
“ One of the things most needed in the recovery of 
men is this very thing — a more decisive manifes¬ 
tation of the wrath principle. Intimidation is the 
first means of grace. No bad mind is arrested by 
love and beauty, till such time as it is balked in evil 
and has put on the ways of thoughtfulness. And 
nothing can be so effectual for this as a distinct 
apprehension of the wrath to come.” And with 
similar insight Professor Phelps says, “ The su¬ 
preme examples of Christlike conviction have usu¬ 
ally grown out of conviction of guilt and fear of 


The Person of Christ and Retribution 159 


hell, in which men have felt themselves driven face 
to face with an indignant God, and for a time left 
there/’ 1 Really it is only after such conviction 
that the melting power of the cross of love be¬ 
comes efficient to save. 

In determining what Christ actually said in re¬ 
gard to the duration of punishment in the future 
world, and this at present is our aim, we are helped 
by discovering, if possible, what those who heard 
him understood him to say. In matters not in¬ 
volving the spiritual discernment, it is safe to af¬ 
firm that what he was understood to say, that he 
actually did say. His teaching was almost exclu¬ 
sively to those of Jewish birth and training — to 
minds saturated with the ideas and traditions of 
the religion of ancient Israel. While their concep¬ 
tions needed constant reconstruction concerning the 
spiritual nature of the kingdom he came to estab¬ 
lish, he nevertheless had a basis of appeal in the 
thought in which the Jewish mind was thoroughly 
trained. “What advantage then hath the Jew? 
or what is the profit of circumcision? Much every 
way: first of all, that they were intrusted with the 
oracles of God” (Rom. iii. 1). There was a 

1 Retribution and How to Preach It. A paper by Pro¬ 
fessor Austin Phelps. 


160 


The Person of Christ 


divine economy in bringing the gospel first of all 
to the “ lost sheep of Israel.” Their mind could be 
constantly forced back upon the Scriptures, which 
they diligently searched. And what was the 
thought of the Jews on this question of retribu¬ 
tion? When Jesus spoke to them on the subject, 
what would they naturally understand him to say? 
Clearly their interpretations of his words would be 
in harmony with the conceptions in which they had 
been trained; and here we are not left in doubt. 
Of the Pharisees, Josephus says, “ They also be¬ 
lieve that souls have an immortal vigor in them, 
and that under the earth there will be rewards and 
punishments, according as they have lived virtu¬ 
ously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to 
be detained in an everlasting prison.” 1 And 
again, “ They say that all souls are incorruptible; 
but that the souls of good men are only removed 
into other bodies — but that the souls of bad men 
are subject to eternal punishment.” 2 Christ knew 
absolutely what his words meant to those thus 
trained and holding such views, and what they un¬ 
derstood him to say he evidently did say. Had he 
the authority to make affirmations on the subject? 

Antiquities of the Jews, book xviii. chap. i. 3. 

2 Wars of the Jews, book ii. chap. viii. 14. 


The Person of Christ and Retribution 161 


No exposition of the words of Jesus concerning 
punishment can be complete which omits an honest 
consideration of what he said concerning the sin 
against the Holy Spirit. All of the Synoptics 
record briefly and in slightly varying form his 
teaching on this subject. In Mark the record is: 
“ Verily I say unto you, All their sins shall be for¬ 
given unto the sons of men, and their blasphemies 
wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: but who¬ 
soever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit 
hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal 
sin: because they said, He hath an unclean spirit ” 
(Mark iii. 28-30). The scribes and Pharisees 
with bitter calumny charged Christ with casting 
out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of demons; 
that is, they attributed a work of God to Satan, 
• which was equivalent to calling evil good and good 
evil (Isa. v. 20) ; which indicated an utter perver¬ 
sion of the moral nature. It was not some specific 
act of sin that was rebuked, but a depraved moral 
state out of which the specific acts constantly arise. 
But why was the sin eternal? The reply involves 
several particulars. 

1. It must ever be borne in mind that the saving 
power in Christ, both in his words and in his deeds, 
is grounded on what he is. As to some things 


162 


The Person of Christ 


which Christ taught, we may make mistake andi yet 
be true; mistake as to what he is is fatal, for it de¬ 
stroys the very basis of trust, of saving faith. True 
religion is nothing other than right relation of 
trust in a divine person. To discern the Christ, to 
see and accept him as he is, is to see and accept the 
Father as he is (John xiv. 9). 

2. The sin against the Holy Spirit is sin against 
the Christ, the Son of God, shown by the Spirit to 
the soul inwardly. This discrimination is indicated 
in Matthew’s record, where he says, “ Whosoever 
shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall 
be forgiven him ” (xii. 32) ; that is, it is a forgiva¬ 
ble sin. The Son of man is here contemplated as a 
human and ethical teacher, presenting his message, 
as it were, outwardly. But when he wrought a 
miracle before their eyes, a work manifestly of the 
power of God, by the manifested agency of the 
Holy Spirit, then the very God was both seen and 
blasphemed. 

3. And this is an “ eternal sin,” because in its 
very nature it annihilates righteousness. There is 
a sin that breaks the marriage bond by its own 
nature and form. Jesus says that for that sin 
alone a man may put away his wife. The sinful 
act destroys the bond, breaks it in sunder, and the 


The Person of Christ and Retribution 163 


legal formality may properly follow. Such is the 
blasphemy against God, when he is revealed by the 
Holy Spirit within. “ It hath never forgiveness ” 
is the appalling record. It is rebellion against the 
infinite and eternal Goodness, and Christ tells us 
that that rebellion will not terminate. It is an 
“ eternal sin.” The will identifies itself with evil, 
and this is the supreme and fatal form of iniquity. 

It need not surprise us that the terrible facts of 
retribution are disclosed in the words, and in con¬ 
nection with the Person who himself is revealed as 
the Infinite Love. Sin is to be measured by the 
apprehended value of the interests invaded; but 
the interests are as great as God and the universe 
of moral beings. These are committed to Christ. 
“All authority hath been given unto me in heaven 
and on earth,” were among the last words he spoke 
while visible in the world, and all sins are com¬ 
paratively venial when compared to resistance to 
that authority. The rejection of the infinite love 
involves one in the infinite peril. To despise the 
“unspeakable gift ” is to commit the unspeakable sin. 

It is often claimed that the preaching of endless 
retribution is unreasonable because it is cruel. 
Retribution may be preached in a coarse and bru¬ 
tal way, it is admitted; but the question after all 


164 


The Person of Christ 


is not whether the doctrine is cruel, but whether 
it is true. And whether it is true turns in the end 
on the further question, whether Christ was such a 
person that he really spoke with authority. If the 
words of Christ were only probably true, our per¬ 
sonal interests are so vast as to put us under the 
weightiest obligation. But what is the stress of the 
obligation when we accept his teaching as the very 
Word of God? And as to the matter of cruelty: 
Which is the more cruel, a mock charity that 
glozes over the announcements of a solemn and 
impending danger? or the faithfulness that accepts 
them fully, and brings both warning and pledge of 
possible deliverance ? Says Dr. Hodge: “ There 

is no more deadly injury, no more wanton cruelty, 
which any man can perpetrate upon a fellow- 
creature, than that which the theological reformer 
is in danger of when, against the apparent mean¬ 
ing of God’s Word, against the unanimous judg¬ 
ment of Christ’s Church, he softens the emphasis 
of warning, and assures the incorrigible sinner that 
it is not, after all, so certain that he must die the 
second death of eternal pain and shame.” 1 
Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, p. 445. 


CHAPTER X 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND THE 
ENDLESS FUTURE 

Whether the endless future is filled with the 
being of the Personal God is not a question need¬ 
ing discussion, for all convinced theists believe it. 
The universe is too small to embrace his being, and 
any conceivable units of time are vastly too short 
to measure his duration. And the God-man Christ 
himself shares the infinity of God, and his blessed 
ministries will fill the ages of ages. This is one of 
the things which Christians surely believe. The 
time will never be when Christ the incarnate God is 
not. He was “ I Am ” before Abraham, and he 
will be “ I Am that I Am ” after “ the heavens be¬ 
ing on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall 
melt with fervent heat.” Not, then, concerning the 
fact of the endless being of the Father and the Son 
is our personal interest engaged; but rather what 
relation has that stupendous fact to our own per¬ 
sonal being and welfare. Here we touch the question 
of our personal immortality; and, put in briefest 
form, it is to be shown, that if Christ is divine, man 
is immortal. To this strict logic surely brings us. 


166 


The Person of Christ 


The ancient interrogative “ If a man die, shall 
he live again ? ” is ever recurring in all serious hu¬ 
man experience. The question put in Job's agony 
must be answered in the negative, as the context 
of the record evidently requires; but the questioner 
here was contemplating only a life that belongs to 
the present world. But is there a life beyond? 
And, if there shall be, what shall be the manner of 
it? The skeptic may deny the possibility of it; the 
agnostic scouts the idea that we have any positive 
knowledge concerning it; the lovers of the pleas¬ 
ures of this world ignore it; the afflicted question 
and wonder; while the Christian clings “ in full 
assurance of hope even unto the end.” Cold skep¬ 
ticism cannot quench the soul’s desire, nor still its 
persistent cry. Robert Ingersoll, inveterate in his 
skepticism, yet, when standing beside the lifeless 
form of a brother who had passed on into the 
unknown, uttered at length his serious thought. 
“ Life is a narrow vale between the cold and bar¬ 
ren peaks of two eternities,” he said. “We strive 
in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, 
and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. 
From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead 
there comes no word; but in the night of death 
hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the 


Person of Christ and Endless Future 167 

rustle of a wing.” The stalwart faith of heroic 
General Armstrong did not fail him in the crucial 
hour, nor did it waver; but in the weary days be¬ 
fore his departure he sat in semi-bewilderment and 
cried, “ I wonder what it will be like.” Wherever 
in the history of the world there has been serious 
thinking, the question of personal immortality has 
emerged. Socrates in his last hours conversed 
about it; Plato in his philosophizing argued; and 
Cicero both questioned and affirmed. “ There is,” 
says Cicero, “ in the minds of men, I know not 
how, a certain presage of future existence ”; from 
which it appears that the arguments rather follow 
than precede the belief. But in what shall we dis¬ 
cover the cause of the “ presage,” the prophetic 
token which fastens itself upon the living soul? 
The question brings us close to a very serious and 
pertinent matter of human interest. 

The conviction concerning a future existence is 
strong or weak in the human mind largely accord¬ 
ing to the standpoint of the thinker. If we take 
our view from the nature and capacities of man, 
our belief will be mostly determined by our concep¬ 
tions of what man is, whether he is great or com¬ 
paratively insignificant. But if we have visions 
of God and of his relations to a human soul, the 


168 


The Person of Christ 


strength of our beliefs in futurity will be deter¬ 
mined by our confidence in his being, his fatherhood, 
and his readiness to communicate to his children, 
in so far as they are able to receive them, the re¬ 
sources of his own unspeakable nature and love. 
Reasons from the standpoint of the nature of man 
himself enable us to construct arguments that have 
value indeed, but they are ancillary and not chief 
in establishing conviction. Plato, for example, had 
five chief proofs for his belief in continued exist¬ 
ence after this life. In briefest statement they 
were: (1) The great capacities of the human soul. 
Here was a form of being too splendid to find its 
satisfactions and wants met by the total of what a 
worldly life can supply. (2) He discovered reg¬ 
nant in the world a law of contraries. There is 
sleep and its opposite vigilance; over against sick¬ 
ness there is the fact of health; over against death 
that of life; hence opposed to mortality there must 
be by the law immortality. (3) Death is dissolu¬ 
tion; but the soul is a unit, and therefore indis¬ 
soluble. Hence it cannot die. It is indiscerptible, 
as Bishop Butler put it. (4) The mystery of 
reminiscence. There come into the mind thoughts 
which we can account for only on the theory of 
an existence prior to the current present; and, if 


Person of Christ and Endless Future 169 


we have existed before the present bodily state, it 
is logical that we shall exist after it. And (5) the 
soul is essentially vital, and vitality in essence can¬ 
not become non-vitality. Now, of these arguments 
we may briefly say, that the first has pertinence 
and value; that the second is imaginary; the third 
purely fanciful; that the fourth assumes a fact not 
proved; and that the fifth begs the question. That 
other, and doubtless safer, arguments have been 
constructed by those who have reasoned from the 
human standpoint we may freely admit; but no one 
of them, or all combined, can be accepted as the 
greatest in producing conviction. 

Among the texts of Scripture, often incorrectly 
or only partially interpreted, is that recorded by 
Matthew in the twenty-second chapter at the 
thirty-second verse. The words were uttered by 
Christ himself. In confuting the Sadducees, who 
said that there is no resurrection, he uses proof 
from the standpoint of the person of God himself. 
He said: “ But as touching the resurrection of the 
dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto 
you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, 
and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God 
is not the God of the dead, but of the living/’ This 
passage is sometimes interpreted to mean simply, 


170 


The Person of Christ 


Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob must now be alive, 
since God sustains to them the relation of friend¬ 
ship and endearment. It does mean that, but also 
more. The deeper thought is, if God is the soul's 
own, then the soul must have the dignity, worth, 
and prerogative of continued and blessed being. 
That God should offer himself to ephemera, crea¬ 
tures whose life begins with the rising of a sun 
and ends with its setting, is transparently absurd. 
God is not the God of dying things, but of living. 
The argument is from the being of God, his friend¬ 
ship and proffered love, to the immortality of man. 
The direction of thought is from God towards 
man; from the fountain and fullness of being to 
one whose finite and dependent being becomes per¬ 
manent in alliance with the infinite source. But 
in the arguments of human invention the thought 
starts with man and feels after immortal life, if 
haply it may reach it. But by this method con¬ 
viction weakens and faith falters. Only by the con¬ 
sciousness of God can the mind become sure; and 
we become conscious of the reality of the being 
and presence of God when we find him in the Lord 
Jesus Christ. He has brought life and immortality 
to light, and in him the soul grasps the thought of 
immortal being. 


Person of Christ and Endless Future 171 


A matter of supreme consequence is often indi¬ 
cated by a single word. The writer of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews in one place says, “ But now they 
desire a better country, that is, a heavenly; where¬ 
fore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their 
God” (Heb. xi. 16). The pith of the passage is 
in the little word “ their.” Those who seek the 
heavenly country ground their search on the fact 
that God is their own, and God is declared to be 
not ashamed of the relation. If God is theirs, so 
is the heavenly country. Why did Anne Steele 
sing, 

“ Let the sweet hope that thou art mine 
My life and death attend,” 

and not, Let the sweet hope that I am thine? The 
latter form would have expressed a true petition, 
but would not have touched the deeper thought. 
The thing of infinite importance to the Christian 
is that God has given Himself to him to be his 
peculiar and most precious possession, for having 
Him he knows that he cannot lack any good thing. 
If God gives Himself, eternal life is fairly implied 
in the bestowment. “ The free gift of God is 
eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. vi. 
23). If Christ is both God and ours, our continued 
life is as secure as his being. 


172 


The Person of Christ 


The Bible rightly interpreted is in harmony with 
itself, and in the matter we are considering the 
ancient record is in agreement with the new. 
A passage, sometimes misinterpreted, is in the 
Psalms, which teaches both the greatness of man, 
and by implication his immortality. His great¬ 
ness is proved by the fact of God’s visitation to 
him and his ministry. 

“ When I consider thy heavens, the work of 
thy fingers, 

The moon and the stars, which thou hast 
ordained; 

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? 

And the son of man, that thou visitedst him? 

For thou hast made him but little lower than 
God, 

And crownest him with glory and honor.” 

Psalm viii. 3-5. 

These words are sometimes supposed to suggest 
the inferiority of man as compared with the great 
things which God has wrought by the skill of his 
fingers. But the meaning clearly is, How great is 
man, that the Maker of the heavens should visit 
him as a companion, friend, and helper! And this 
interpretation seems to be definitely required by 
the words, “ For thou hast made him but little 
lower than God, and crownest him with glory and 


Person of Christ and Endless Future 173 


honor.” To extinguish his being, to sink him in 
inevitable night, is not to crown him with glory 
and honor. Here again we reason to the immor¬ 
tality of man from the greatness and presence of 
God. He that shares in the ever-present God 
cannot ultimately die. 

And here once more also the question emerges, 
How does a true belief concerning the person of 
Christ affect one’s conviction respecting his per¬ 
sonal immortality? his hopes for the joys of an 
endless future ? Much assuredly, and in many 
ways. How has it come to pass that many hold 
stoutly to their circumscribed creed which accepts 
the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of 
man coincidently with a doubt concerning their 
own future life? It is one thing to believe that 
God is a Father, and another and very different 
thing to believe that he is mine. It is through Christ 
the divine Lord that God comes to a soul as its 
own, its personal possession and prerogative; and, 
if it shall have God in such a way, it cannot doubt 
as to the great future and its blessed being. The 
truth then abides, that doubt and belief concerning 
immortality vary in definite ratio with our recep¬ 
tion or rejection of the personal Christ, and our 
appropriation of him as Saviour and Lord. He 


174 


The Person of Christ 


came to bring life and immortality to light; and 
to have God in him is to possess that which he 
came to bring. It was himself that said, “ Verily, 
verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, 
and believeth him that sent me hath eternal life, 
and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed 
out of death into life” (John v. 24). “Hath” 
eternal life! Has it now. It is his in the elements 
of present spiritual experience, and his as a well- 
grounded hope for the joys of the endless future. 
The existence of such a hope proves its correlate. 
If the hope is rational and normal, the object of it 
is real. It is worldliness, not godliness, that up¬ 
roots our confidence in regard to the future life. 
He that hath the Christ of God cannot doubt. The 
Christ of God; not a Christ of human speculations, 
the “ psychology ” of whose consciousness our 
sciolism aspires to unfold, but him of the Book, 
offered to human need in his revealed majesty and 
helpfulness, and in mystery of being too deep for 
human penetration and exposition. “ Whom not 
having seen we love; on whom, though now ye see 
him not, yet believing, we rejoice greatly with joy 
unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter i. 8). 

It has been said that belief in the personality of 
man and the personality of God stand and fall to- 


Person of Christ and Endless Future 175 

gether. In all pantheistic forms of religion faith 
in the personality of God is vague and weak, or 
even non-existent; there you find also doubts con¬ 
cerning the personality of man. He is conceived 
as being merged at death into the all, or he passes 
into nothingness, like the brutes. By parity of 
reasoning we find doubts concerning immortality 
existing coincidently with doubts whether God has 
come to man in free revelations of himself, visit¬ 
ing him to redeem, to save, and to bless. He that 
has no Saviour and Lord passes at death into 
what is to him the wilderness of the dark and un¬ 
explored unknown. How infinitely remote this 
from the exultant assurance of Paul, “ For I know 
him whom I have believed, and I am persuaded 
that he is able to guard that which I have com¬ 
mitted unto him against that day” (2 Tim. i. 12). 




Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: July ,2005 

PreservationTechnologie 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIC 

111 Thomson Park Dnve 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 


pr 

n 0 * 


One copy del. to Cat. Div. 


JON 2 »$W 



